By Hunter Homistek

What’s up with some MMA fans?

At UFC Fight Night 88, rising bantamweights Cody Garbrandt and Thomas Almeida faced off in the night’s main event. Each fighter deserved the spotlight. They were both 24 years old and undefeated, boasting power from all angles that could shut off the lights in an instant.

Garbrandt blitzed Almeida, stopping his Brazilian foe with with a powerful and precise boxing attack in the fight’s first round. The win was dominant and impressive. “No Love” never looked better.

While plenty of the post-fight commentary centered around Garbrandt’s brilliance, a strong contingent of fans rushed to take a different position: “Almeida was overhyped, and I knew it. Yes!”

Why are we excited about a young fighter getting starched? Why not, “I look forward to his next test to see if he can bounce back.”?

Schadenfreude runs rampant in MMA, and it’s disheartening. Just ask Bleacher Report’s Patrick Wyman, who literally had to utilize Twitter’s “mute” functionality to save himself from the unfounded negativity post-fight.

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At 20-0, Almeida deserved his hype. His knockouts inside the UFC Octagon—of which he notched three in four total outings—were devastating. That he got wiped out by Garbrandt does not invalidate his past success. It simply shows just how good “No Love” really is when he’s firing at full strength.

Prospects, and particularly exciting ones like Almeida and Garbrandt, make MMA fun. The UFC Fight Night 88 main event materialized because both fighters showed massive promise. Aljamain Sterling and Bryan Caraway, ranked No. 4 and No. 8 in the 135-pound division, respectively, fought earlier on the card, during the UFC Fight Pass portion of the event. 

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Almeida was ranked seventh, and Garbrandt was unranked, yet the two 24 year olds earned top billing over their divisional peers. It’s because they’re entertaining. They’re young. They’re prospects to watch moving forward, and their styles made for one hell of a fight on paper. The UFC invested in them in that top spot because they have value—not just to generate fan interest, but to propel the sport as a whole forward.

Young stars like Almeida, like Garbrandt, and like Sterling (who also lost at the event) keep the divisions moving. They inject the sport with youth and promise, with potential and intrigue. They’re fun now, but their futures interest us, as fans, even more.

So when they run into a grinding, hard-nosed grappler like Caraway or a boxing specialist who’s trained with Olympic-level coaches since his early teens, maybe we shouldn’t be so happy to watch them fail. Maybe we should instead look forward to their next step, to that unexplored world that piqued our interest in the first place: their future. It’s still there, you know.

Both Almeida and Sterling will be back because both Almeida and Sterling are phenomenally gifted at fighting. They took their lumps Sunday night, but that won’t stop them from showcasing their full abilities inside the cage moving forward.

It’ll be a shame if you’re too busy reveling in their past failures to enjoy it.