I am not sure there are many who really though DC would win but rather were able to convince themselves they thought DC was going to win; it was not necessarily about being a Jone's hater but a deep seeded need to see Jone's pedestal broken from under him that has, I think, become sub conscious for many if not most MMA fans.
I mean, again, looking at Cormier's best wins:
Bigfoot Silva: The guy basically moves like he got stuck in quicksand. His massive size and frame alone can overwhelm other HWs but once you get past that you can crush him a al Arlovski.
Roy Nelson: The quintessential big, fat slow HW. Mir, Werdum, Dos Santos and Miocic all totally ruined his shit and Arlovski put his lights out.
Josh Barnett: Had already been fighting in MMA for 15 years at that point so was over the hill to say the least. Also never known for his TDD or for being able to fight at his best without performance enhancers. It took Browne literally a minute to put him away.
Mir: Has now lost 4 in a row at HW. Is at best a low level gatekeeper in a thin division now.
Dan Henderson: A truly over the hill LHW/MW whose sole win in his previous 4 fights was against a completely shot Shogun.
Then add the fact that he is very much an old man in a sport where old men like Henderson and Couture are really not the norms.
And then when it comes to body types, he had literally the worst body type a fighter going up against Jones could possibly have.
So when you add it all up, I think that many of us, even the pro fighters who made their picks, had this sub conscious need to get behind DC as the guy to smash Jone's pedestal. I know that is how it was for me. I did try to make some kind of case that Cormier was gonna win at one point but deep down I knew his chances of winning were not much beyond a puncher's chance. I think with Jones, it has been that way since before he got the belt. I think by the time he took Vera apart it was apparent he was something genuinely special in MMA and was destined to stand out in a big way; many of us were just desperately trying to convince ourselves otherwise. After the Vera fight and seeing all these over the hill LHWs go a tit, I tried to convince myself it was all hype but really I could see from the start, if I am honest with myself, that it was only a matter of time before he took out the whole lot of them.
