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Is it harder to love Conor McGregor in this reality after the post-bus incident? Will his fortune change significantly if he can not beat Khabib Nurmagomedov at UFC 229? And on a scale of one to WTF?!, How excited are we for the main event of the UFC 230?
All this and more in Twitter Mailbag this week. To ask your own question, tweet to @BenFowlkesMMA.
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There will definitely be people who will tell you that you are too sensitive (pro advice: they have a Twitter account with Conor McGregor's name or likeness as a central point, mute them and move on), but screw. I say that if you buy your ticket and travel with all the other fans, you have to decide how much you feel about the personal behavior of the fighters.
And I know what you mean about McGregor. For a while, his "to-do" routine was fun and refreshing, especially when it came to pushing the reins of the UFC leadership and hurting the individual fighter.
Then he jumped into the Bellator's cage and accosted the officials there just because he wanted to celebrate with his friend and that was as if, OK, some rules are there for a reason . Then came the manual truck incident and he began to get the impression that it might not be a disruptive force after chaotic upheavals, but rather a selfish idiot.
Everyone makes mistakes (maybe not those exact mistakes), but you're right, that's the answer that leaves something to be desired. This bus incident in Brooklyn has ruined the lives and livelihoods of other fighters. They were fighters who did not do anything to him. They were just on the way to Hurricane Conor. Bad luck, kid.
Again, look on the other side of the cage. There is Khabib Nurmagomedov, who seemed to be a charming emissary from a far country. We then learned that he liked to humiliate the homeless for fun but felt that attending a rap concert was unacceptable behavior.
The fact is that the nature of professional fights sometimes forces us to look for a hero even if there is none to find. Instead, there are just people, messy and complex, who are the ones who compose them, even if we want a slightly better version.
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The only place where McGregor will certainly not show up, regardless of the evolution of the main event of UFC 229, is the bottom of the line. Even if he is absolutely transported by Nurmagomedov, he will remain the biggest star of the company and, as such, the UFC will give him just about everything he asks.
Besides, who would refuse a fight with McGregor, even after a defeat? It would be like saying to the dump truck full of money that he can not park in your driveway as it will prevent you from getting your job at the minimum wage. Everyone wants a monster against McGregor.
Do not forget, the best-selling UFC pay-per-view of all time? This is his revenge with Nate Diaz, the one who arrived just after being slapped and submitted. Conventional wisdom might tell us that a loss will hurt a fighter's power of attraction, but in the McGregor affair at least, recent history suggests the opposite.
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Well, that's not a good sign for a fighter when the most famous UFC commentator has no idea who you are. Ideally, a person who would fight for the title in the main event of the pay-per-view would elicit at least a slight sense of recognition among the people who are paid to know what is happening at the UFC. And yet we are there.
This is not the fault of Sijara Eubanks. She does her best, trying to make the most of an opportunity, and you can not blame her for that. Nor is it the fault of Valentina Shevchenko. The UFC seems to have decided that she should win the women's welterweight title, and she is just trying to win the fight that will allow her to reach her goal.
However, it is disconcerting from the point of view of sales and marketing. Nobody asked for this fight. No one, other than the participants, is invested in it. And what are you going to do as a poster head at Madison Square Garden?
I'm not saying that the UFC completely gives up selling us this event. I wonder, though, what would an abandonment look like, and how would that be different?
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The UFC is trying to convince us that Nate Diaz is no longer a star for a few years. Do you remember everything you do? Yes, it was in response to him. It eventually became half of the two largest UFC TV channels in the history of the UFC.
Diaz, like his brother, has an obstinate call that suffers neither defeat nor absence. Like the moon, she continues to exist. But even when Diaz and his opponent UFC 230, Dustin Poirier, are trying to make guerilla marketing for their upcoming fight, no one at the UFC seems to want to work with them.
This perhaps proves how much the UFC wants to avoid putting one of the Diaz mercurial boys in a position where he can really qualify himself.
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I understand your point of view, but this only applies to situations in which a fighter must be removed from a combat card for which he has already been reserved and announced. Even then, the fighter can explain himself if he wishes, as Sean O'Malley has done recently, or he can let the process unfold before he is made public.
I still think it's a good change because we've seen so many cases where everything is to blame for a tainted supplement at the end, but not after the fighter in question has been stained by the prosecution. Then it's like printing a retraction on page 12 for a story that was front and center.
In this way, they will perhaps understand what they announce before announcing it, which is an idea that I can subscribe to.
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Weight-cut. Not only is it the only one that is actually physically dangerous for anyone, but I think it is also unnecessarily harming the sport in a way that we do not always achieve.
Fighters who do not die of hunger and do not dehydrate before the fight are fighters who will certainly offer better performances. They could also have a longer and better career. They will certainly be healthier and when everyone reduces their weight, it's not like everyone benefits. They are killing each other just to keep from falling, which is crazy.
We could lose that and be better at it. After that, we can then talk about the events of the seven-hour Combat Night and tentative titles without meaning.
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Dana White had the advantage of embarking on a brand synonymous with the sport itself. That's not to say that the owners of the UFC failed to build this brand once they got it. But he never had to do what Scott Coker did both at Strikeforce and now at Bellator, carving out a place in a niche sport dominated by a much larger competitor.
White would probably say that this domination is not a coincidence, just as he would say that the only reason MMA is still a thing today is because of the work that the UFC and its owners have done to achieve it. . These statements are not totally false, but they do not tell the whole story either.
Coker did a solid job of clinging and building something from scratch. He sometimes took fighters that the UFC had declared and done with and turned them into real attractions. Plus, he did it all with the UFC boot tapping on his fingers. If he was so bad at that, White and Co. probably would not have had to buy his last business just to get rid of it.
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It's been a while since I beat this drum. Tournaments have a meaning for combat sports and have been used in almost all of them. Of course, before giving the example to PFL and Bellator, we should perhaps wait to see what they look like in the end.
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I guess I can not help but wonder how much the MMA fighters bother to learn about the history and culture of the ancient Spartans before they identify with them through things as: tattoos and nicknames. Because some of the things the Spartans have prepared are not things that many fighters would like to be associated with now. Maybe these are the dangers of seeing a cool movie on a subject and not looking further before burning it on your body.
Ben Fowlkes is MMAjunkie and MMA columnist for USA TODAY. Follow him on Twitter at @BenFowlkesMMA. Twitter Mailbag appears every Thursday on MMAjunkie.
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