Twitter Mailbag: Blame for B.J. Penn's loss, justification for interim titles, and more

In this week’s Twitter Mailbag, should coaches really send a fighter into battle when they have good reason to believe he’s in for a thorough beatdown? And if these interim titles get us five-round fights and clear contenders, does that justify their existence?

All that and more awaits you in the TMB. To ask a question of your own, tweet it to @BenFowlkesMMA.

I assume that the JW stands for Jackson-Winkeljohn and the BJ stands for B.J. Penn, meaning your thesis here is that Penn’s new coaches knew he stood no chance against young Yair Rodriguez, who they’ve also trained, but they sent him out there to get beat up anyway and now there’s a former great’s blood on their hands. Is that about the size of it?

Because, if so, we need to look at your assumptions in that question. For one, you’re assuming that the crew at Greg Jackson and Mike Winkeljohn’s gym knew that Penn was dead meat against Rodriguez. You’re also assuming that, when coaches know that their fighters are overmatched, they have some responsibility to intervene.

Let’s say the first assumption is at least partially true. Most fight trainers I’ve known, it’s not in their nature to be total pessimists to the point at which they look at one guy (especially a former UFC champ) and conclude that he has zero chance whatsoever, but they might admit to themselves that if their guy can’t get it to the floor, he’s probably in trouble. They might even admit that getting the fight to the floor will be tough.

They might, in their bleaker moments, acknowledge that there are far more ways for their guy to lose than win. What then?

If every coach pulled their fighters out of fights they thought they might lose, I’m guessing we’d see a lot fewer fights. We’d also probably see shorter careers, not to mention fewer of those inspiring comebacks we love so much. Remember when the MMA world wrote Andrei Arlovski off as a lost cause? It was those optimists at Jackson-Winkeljohn who helped bring him back.

I think a lot also depends on the specific gym, and on that gym’s collective attitude toward molding a fighter’s career. Some gyms intertwine training and management under one roof. Others just accept the fighters and the matchups as they come and take a hands-off approach to picking opponents or guiding career moves. Jackson-Winkeljohn is way more of the latter than the former.

Does that do a disservice to fighters like Penn, who probably could have used someone to talk him out of this latest bad idea? It’s easy to say that now. But how about all the times Jackson-Winkeljohn fighters did surprise everyone, maybe including their own coaches?

I keep hearing this argument as a justification for the proliferation of UFC interim titles. If it gives us a five-round fight, people say, and cements a specific challenger for whenever the champion’s “interim” is over, then isn’t it ultimately a good thing?

I guess my question is, why can’t we just call it what it is? If it’s a fight to determine the no. 1 contender, then it’s not a title fight. The whole point of having a title for each weight class is that there’s only one. If we create a different kind of title (that looks exactly the same) as an excuse to book a longer fight and as a reminder of who’s next, we’re just lying to ourselves.

Why not just create a no. 1 contender belt? Better yet, how about a medal of some kind? Or maybe a really fancy bracelet? Something that differentiates it from the real thing, but is still a reason to fight five rounds and a physical reminder of who’s got next. And don’t tell me that the UFC can’t just create a new kind of combat sports title, defying all convention. These are the same people who gave us the prelim main event, for crying out loud.

Oh, fun. Now we have a new thing to blame bad judging outcomes on. And why not, right? There were plenty of instances in which the judges seemed to misconstrue the old criteria, so it stands to reason that they’d find a way to screw up the new guidelines from time to time as well. All I know for sure is that when the winning fighter says he feels guilty about the decision you gave him, man, you done messed up.

The closest you’re going to get might be Derek Campos vs. Derek Anderson in a lightweight battle I’m calling Total Derekstruction™. They’re two of the youngest fighters on the main card, and they’re both riding two-fight winning streaks. That’s, you know, not nothing. Do they count as “pending stars”? Let’s just say the jury’s still out there. But at least it’s a reason to tune in early for the first televised fight of the evening on Spike TV.

It’s an interesting question I found myself thinking a lot about after writing this story on Mike Richman, the former Bellator fighter who was very candid about his steroid use after failing a drug test in 2015. Richman said that none of his coaches or training partners knew he was using performance-enhancing drugs. Maybe they suspected it when he started gaining muscle mass, and some of his teammates joked about him bulking up, he said, but according to him it wasn’t a coordinated effort or even anything the people training him knew about.

If Cody Garbrandt is throwing oblique accusations T.J. Dillashaw’s way it a) doesn’t mean there’s anything to them, and b) doesn’t mean that whatever was or wasn’t happening was necessarily done (or not done) in league with Team Alpha Male. It could just be training room gossip, for all we know. Trust me, there’s more of that than you think in this sport, even among a bunch of adult professionals.

Athletes in other pro sports renegotiate their contracts in the middle of them, so why not fighters? I think a lot of it has to do with expectations. If the UFC snatches some lightweight off the local circuit and signs him to a four-fight deal, it generally does so with the understanding that the fighter is still a developing asset. His pay is crap to start out, increasing only incrementally as he wins, and he can be cut at any time with no recompense.

But say that lightweight surprises everyone. He fills in as a late replacement here and there, knocks out a couple big names, and now suddenly you want him to fight an established contender for rookie pay.

He has overperformed, in other words. If he’d underperformed, the UFC would have shredded his contract with a quickness. So why isn’t he justified in wanting to renegotiate the deal in light of his current standing and new expectations?

The UFC structures its contracts so that they are heavily in favor of the promoter. It really shouldn’t be a surprise when a fighter who gains a little bit of leverage tries to use it to get something back. As we’ve heard over and over again from current and former UFC fighters, even champions, going along and hoping it will all even out in the end is a good way to get shortchanged.

Word is that after much public complaining, Gegard Mousasi finally got the UFC to give him a fight, and it’s against Chris Weidman. That’s a crackerjack of a match-up right there, and perfect next step in a middleweight division that is arguably better than it’s ever been.

If Mousasi wins that, I’d have to think he’s in line for a title shot next. He’s finally figured out how to promote himself, and you can see fans responding to it. Glumly frustrated Mousasi is the best Mousasi. If the UFC lets him slip away now, well, maybe it just doesn’t deserve him.

It would make for an interesting pair of fights. First the battle to get out of their UFC contracts by bringing the Muhammad Ali Act into play. Second, Conor McGregor vs. Nate Diaz III, this time with the big gloves and no leg kicks or silly old chokes? Yeah, I’d watch that. But you’ll have to forgive me if I don’t rush to put it on my calendar just yet.

UFC flyweight champion Demetrious Johnson just fought a reality TV show tournament winner in his last title defense, so clearly the division is aching for new contenders. The way Sergio Pettis is going, he could be one very soon. If anything, the danger is that he’ll end up there too soon, if only because there are so few other possibilities. Pettis is just 23, still developing, and I’d hate to see him rushed into a title fight. But if he wins a couple more, it may be inevitable.

Ben Fowlkes is MMAjunkie and USA TODAY’s MMA columnist. Follow him on Twitter at @BenFowlkesMMA. Twitter Mailbag appears every Thursday on MMAjunkie.