What If: Rivals 1 Happened Before Fresh Meat?

Many consider Rivals 1 the best season in the history of The Challenge.

Pairing hated enemies like Kenny/Wes and CT/Adam together and bringing on nearly every big character of that era made Rivals the biggest season at that point in Challenge history.

But one has to wonder…why did it take the show so long to do a Rivals season?

It wasn’t until Bill Simmons got a question about it in his mailbag column in 2010 that got the momentum going to have Rivals, or as they called it back then, “Frenemies”.

The show hadn’t done many partner seasons up to that point — only the two Fresh Meat seasons and Battle of the Seasons (2002). Going back to Rivals 1, nine of the last 16 seasons have been pair seasons (including War of the Worlds).

If The Challenge had the foresight, the golden age of the show was prime for a Rivals season.

For the sake of this hypothetical scenario, let’s just say Rivals 1 happened right after Gauntlet 2. You couldn’t ask for a better bridge season from Fresh Meat, one of the biggest turning points in Challenge history, than doing a Rivals season with all the biggest stars of the era.

I’m going to include some people in this article who didn’t appear on the show after Gauntlet 2 and might have been…