Aljamain Sterling is a worthy contender. So worthy, his upcoming bout with bantamweight champion Petr Yan just may be the best fight the UFC could possibly make right now.
It wasn’t always this way. While Yan’s path to the title was as straight as the right hand that got him there, Sterling hit more than a few bumps in the road on his way up. After winning his first four Octagon appointments, he went on to lose two straight, one to the widely disliked Bryan Caraway, and one to the infamously ignored Raphael Assuncao.
If a piranha tank division like bantamweight has such a thing as gatekeepers, then these two men were them.