Realizing that beautiful things can be accomplished in the summertime, Bellator kicked off its 8-man featherweight tournament last night on MTV 2. If you happened to miss it, we’ve got a quick recap of how things went down along with a few gifs for your viewing pleasure after the jump.

Come on Internet, where are all the awesome fan-made promos? VidProps: mleqs

Damn, we’re glad we didn’t make plans this summer, because we’re going to be typing our hands off over the next few weeks. After the warm up-act of the TUF 13 Finale, we enter one of those fun times when there’s always another show coming up to talk about: we’ll have some big MMA event every weekend. That’s good for you, since we’re less likely to try something new and different. Also good for us, because ideas are hard.

This Weekend

Friday, 10 June — MFC 30: Up Close and Personal The biggest MMA promotion in Canada returns for action, featuring Drew Fickett vs Brian Cobb, Marcus Davis vs Pete Spratt, Thomas Denny vs Sheldon Westcott, and the other Lima brother in welterweight action. Stay tuned for a full preview of the card.

Saturday, 11 June — UFC 131: Carwin vs Dos Santos. More like UFC 131: Snakebit, right? (Just kidding. But seriously.) Carwin vs Dos Santos; plus a pretty nice list of compelling names, but not a lot of intriguing matchups (Poirier vs who?) On the other hand, we couldn’t agree on many predictions while discussing this for the Bum Rush, so no telling how the card goes. Plus, Nick Ring vs James Head jokes will write themselves for a week, easy. Success!

“I believe you yanks call this a mean mug?” PicProps: Bellator.com

Since we mentioned it yesterday in that blatant vanity post, we’ll go ahead and fill you in with some of the details about Bellator’s plans for the summer. As you may remember, a BFC press release announcing the deal with MTV2 made a vague mention of “a collection of special feature events” on top of two full seasons a year. Details at the time were sketchy, and we weren’t really sure what those special feature events would entail. As the season four tournaments unfolded, we heard more and more about tournament action between seasons, initially referred to as a “mini-tournament”. We’d been thinking that this meant perhaps a couple of four-man brackets, maybe some of those Super Fights that Bellator digs so much.

Man, we were way off. Bjorn Rebney, head honcho of the BFC, has put together another intriguing tournament at 145, and that, ladies and germs, will be your main course for the summer series. If you are interested in that kind of thing, we’ve prepared a short primer on the featherweight tourney, plus a preview of Bellator 46, where the four quarterfinals will kick off in that other Hollywood.

Although we suppose you could come in and just throw poop at the new guy. Whatever.