Twitter Mailbag: How many chances should Rousimar Palhares get, exactly?

Rousimar Palhares

In this week’s Twitter Mailbag, are we finally ready to label Rousimar Palhares the most egregious rule-breaker in MMA history? And is UFC Fight Night 73 the last best chance for Glover Teixeira to prove he can be somebody in the UFC?

We’ll also discuss Ronda Rousey’s star turn, and Diego Sanchez’s weight class change, among other topics.

Got a question of your own? Tweet it to @BenFowlkesMMA. It really is that easy.

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He’s not going to win any sportsmanship awards, that’s for sure. Palhares has a problem. It’s a problem that starts somewhere between his ears, and manifests itself in the movement of his hands and occasionally his mouth.

This isn’t the first time he’s concluded that anyone he can’t get a hold of must be greasing. Remember when he paused mid-fight to complain about his inability to get a grip on Nate Marquardt’s leg? That mental lapse got him knocked out, and when officials checked Marquardt immediately after the fight, they found no evidence of wrongdoing. It’s almost as if Palhares is an extremely poor sport. As in, the kind of poor sport who puts his fingers in your eyes when he’s losing.

I understand why WSOF opted to suspend and strip him, but not cut him. The fact that he cannot contain himself to the many forms of violence allowed within the rules, that makes him fascinating to watch. You’re always wondering what crazy stuff will happen in his next fight. Plus, if we’re being honest, he really is quite good. You can tell by how he keeps submitting people who don’t get submitted.

Still, he can’t keep doing this. Eventually even the already insane world of MMA will say enough’s enough. But if he hasn’t got the message by now, after being fired from one job and suspended by more than one commission, what’s it going to take?

Despite taking former UFC light heavyweight champ Jon Jones “to the limit” (what the commercial forgot to add was “…of the allowable time in which to get beaten up”), I’d say Teixeira is pretty far out of the title picture already.

The ad for UFC Fight Night 73 failed to mention that after the episode with Jones and limits, Teixeira lost a decision to Phil Davis, who then bolted for Bellator. A loss to Ovince Saint Preux makes it three straight, which is a long fall even if it started at the very top of the division.

The good news for Teixeira is that this is a winnable fight for him, and against a guy with a two-fight streak that looks good on paper. We’ve seen that Teixeira’s chin holds up well under fire, and I really don’t see OSP submitting him. That means Saint Preux likely has to beat him up for five rounds to win a decision whereas Teixeira only needs to land one of those hammers. I think that’s doable for him. I also think that if he doesn’t do it this will be the last time we see him in a UFC main event.

You’ll get no argument from me. Rousey vs. Cristiane Justino is the biggest women’s fight the UFC could possibly make, and I have to think Zuffa executives know that. I also think they’re at least a little bit worried that “Cyborg” might win that fight, so they’re going to take their time and wring some more cash out of these Rousey squash matches before they make it.

That’s a somewhat understandable strategy, but a risky one. The best time to make this fight is right now, while they’re both hot, before anything weird can happen.

If combat sports history teaches us anything, it’s that the more likely scenario is the fight happening a few years too late or not at all.

I think some of it is maturity. When we see Rousey explaining her thoughts on femininity and body image, we see someone who has learned the power of her own voice. She has the potential to reach people and impact their lives, and maybe realizing that helps her to feel like she doesn’t have to channel the Diaz brothers just to get attention.

Fight fans, whether they realize it or not, want their fighters to be about something. It’s why just being very good and very bland isn’t enough in this sport, though it usually is in others.

When Rousey takes on larger issues, opens up about her own struggles, or even when she burns Floyd Mayweather Jr. , she fills that role for a lot of people. They feel like she stands for them in some way, and her success then becomes their success. Maybe that’s why they don’t care if the outcomes of her fights seem like foregone conclusions.

Depends how you define success. Is Sanchez going to become the UFC featherweight champ? No way. Is he going to put a little distance between himself and forced retirement? Maybe, but it probably won’t be as much distance as he thinks.

More likely he’ll discover that the fighters at 145 pounds are even faster than the ones at 155 pounds, and last time he checked, most of them were too fast for him at this point in his career.

This is a classic case of the change in weight classes as the fighter’s false friend. It provides the illusion of a clean slate, and offers the fighter just enough of a reason to believe everything will be different. It won’t, though, because the problems Sanchez is facing are not about weight – they’re about time.

It’s possible Georges St-Pierre is doing that for a calculated reason, one that might influence the number of zeroes that appear of a paycheck somewhere down the line. Or maybe avoiding any specific use of the r-word is, in his mind, the only way to make retirement seem manageable.

He wouldn’t be the first pro fighter to have difficulty with the concept of never again stepping inside the cage. I remember working on this story about life after retirement for the fighters from the “comeback” season of “The Ultimate Fighter.” One of the things that kept popping up was this idea that, yes, they were done fighting, unless one specific thing happened.

For some it was a certain fight, maybe a rematch with another guy from their era, or just the right-size payday. Others told themselves that they were done fighting, but maybe the right grappling match could lure them back to some form of paid competition.

The more I heard this, the more it seemed less like anything these guys actually wanted to have happen, and more like something they could tell themselves so the idea of retirement didn’t seem so scary, or so final.

Maybe that’s what GSP is doing. Maybe he feels like as long as he doesn’t have to look this monster directly in the eye, he can live with it. Or maybe he’s just waiting for the pile of money to get big enough that a comeback seems worth it.

That’s a bad comparison, and I wish people (especially the ones offering it in defense of Palhares) would stop making it.

Talk to fighters, and they’ll tell you that knockouts often come as a surprise. You’re throwing punches, just focusing on making them land. Then your opponent is on the floor, and the only thing on your mind is finish, finish, finish. You can’t blame a fighter in that situation for failing to do a full consciousness check before throwing another punch. That’s what the ref is there for, is to tell him when it’s over.

Submissions are different. When you apply a submission, you know (or at least have reason to hope) that the end is near. You’re waiting for the tap, and for the referee intervention that will follow. All your training prepares you for that. If anything, it almost takes a conscious effort not to let go at that point. Unless, as has been argued in Palhares’ case, you’re just so “zoned in” that you can’t let go in a timely fashion.

But if that’s the case – if it’s really not something you’re in control of – that only seems like more of a reason to keep you out of the cage.

The fact that no one really seems that upset about Jake Shields’ post-fight punch probably tells us what the current sentiment is regarding Palhares. But still, there should be some punishment, if only to remind us that you don’t get to break the rules just because someone else did it first.

I’d support a short suspension, even the three- or six-month variety that’s mostly meaningless to fighters who only compete a couple times per year. Just enough to show that what Shields did was wrong, even though we understand why he did it.

I’m glad you liked the story on Ben Rothwell and his gym, but getting to do those kinds of stories is a luxury in the current MMA media climate. They take time and money. They take resources. A lot of sites don’t think it’s worth the investment, since you can often get around the same number of clicks with a phone interview and a snappy headline.

That’s not to say that phone interviews are bad. I’ve had plenty of interesting, illuminating ones. But usually how it works is, the week before an event the UFC blocks off chunks of time during which some fighter on the upcoming card does one 10-minute phoner after another. That sucks, because no one is having any fun there. Not the writer, who gets neither the time nor the space to actually learn anything in this interview. Not the fighter, who gets asked the same questions over and over again, because there are only so many reasonable questions you can ask someone before a fight. Not even the UFC PR flack who listens in to make sure nothing weird happens.

It’s just a media assembly line, churning out one piece of online content after another. It’s efficient, in a way, but it’s also boring. It’s how you end up reading a story about how Fighter X has never been more ready for a fight in his life, or how he’s preparing for the best possible version of Fighter Y. I don’t blame you for not being so into that.

The difference between Rousey’s win over Bethe Correia and Chad Mendes’ win over Cody McKenzie is that, for Rousey, there really were no better options available.

The UFC had four fighters ranked ahead of Correia at the time of the fight, and Rousey had already beaten them all. The top contender is Miesha Tate, who Rousey’s beaten twice, with us already complaining about the third time before it even happens. Who else is Rousey supposed to defend her title against? What better choice is there at women’s bantamweight right now?

That wasn’t the case when Mendes faced McKenzie. As UFC matchmaker Sean Shelby later explained, it was a late-replacement scenario in which the UFC essentially felt like it had to give Mendes some sort of fight to compensate him for the time and money he’d already invested in his training camp. McKenzie was the only one willing to take it, so he got it. Even now, it’s not exactly something you’ll hear UFC executives discuss with great pride.

In fairness, Jessica Aguilar debuted in the UFC with probably the toughest non-title bout any female strawweight could possibly get.

Claudia Gadelha is the only fighter so far to really keep things close against UFC women’s strawweight champ Joanna Jedrzejczyk, who handed Gadelha her only pro loss, which came via split decision.

Point is, yes, Aguilar faced lesser competition outside the UFC, but then she faced really, really good competition as soon as she set foot in the octagon. That’s one good thing about the UFC’s decision to add female 115-pounders, is the way it’s consolidating the talent that was previously spread out among whichever organizations were in the business of WMMA at the moment.

But don’t write off Aguilar just yet. Once she finds her footing in the UFC, she may still surprise some people.

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