One of the last tournaments of the Bjorn Rebney era of Bellator wrapped up on Friday night as Liam McGeary scored the third ever inverted triangle choke submission victory in Bellator history as he defeated Kelly Anundson in the first round at Bellator 124. 
The victory won McGeary the 2014 Summer Series Light Heavyweight Tournament and he improved to 9-0 in his career and six of those wins have come in Bellator.
In the fight on Friday night against Anundson, McGeary did land a solid knee early, but would end up getting taken down to the ground. Leading into the fight, a major question on McGeary was what would happen if Anundson took him down to the ground. He answered this question as he looked for various submissions off his back and eventually locked in the inverted triangle choke to get the victory.
Prior to the stoppage, there were two instances where McGeary looked close to finishing the fight with a keylock submission and Anundson moaned in pain. While some referees may have come in to stop the fight, Dan Miragliotta allowed the fight to continue. The end of the fight would come with just thirteen seconds left in the opening round and the ever growing star of McGeary continues to grow.
Prior to the fight tonight, I tweeted that McGeary has a very underrated ground game. Did I think he would submit Anundson? That is not the path I saw him taking to victory, but it happened. He proved to not only mixed martial arts fans and media, he proved to Scott Coker, Rich Chou, and Zach Light that he could be the next great fighter to compete in the Bellator cage.
Ever since Coker became the President of Bellator, he has constantly talked about how they need to build new stars. McGeary has a style that fans want to watch, and he has the personality to go along with that style. Just look at some of the quotes Bellator released to the media this week. He talked about how Anundson was lucky to be in the finals because his opponent in the semifinals (Philipe Lins) blew out his knee, and openly discussed how he wanted to see Emanuel Newton win, which happened.
McGeary has star written all over him and this is something I have stated for the past couple of months. Nearly one year ago, I labeled McGeary as one of the best prospects currently signed by the promotion and well he has made me look very intelligent to this point.
After the victory, I noticed fans and media people discussing some of the weaknesses in the ground game of McGeary. Remember when people questioned the stand up game of Will Brooks after he won the season nine lightweight tournament? Just like Brooks, McGeary is only going to get better and if you are a current light heavyweight fighter in Bellator, you will want to face McGeary now, not later.