“It was hard to miss the glow of delighted schadenfreude from social media, as Sage Northcutt tapped out to a Bryan Barberena arm-triangle at UFC on Fox 18 on Saturday in Newark, New Jersey. No judgment from me: Everyone enjoys this sport for their own reasons, and he provides more than enough fodder to draw the kind of sinister satisfaction from his defeat that he did. If anything, I feel bad for the people who took joy in his loss, for no other reason than the fact that this will be a short-lived source of happiness. At least, it should be.
Northcutt is good for the sport and not just because he’s a genuinely nice — if not supremely dorky — counterargument to the negative stereotypes prevalent in the fight game. More accurately, he’s a bellwether that the sport is moving in a good direction…”