Twitter Mailbag: Jon Jones fails a drug test, and the MMA world goes mad

Jon Jones

OK, I get it. A lot of you want to talk about all the ins and outs of Jon Jones’ drug test, not to mention the role of the UFC and NSAC in this confounding mess.

We can do that. Then once that’s out of the way, we’ll move on and talk Conor McGregor, Nick Diaz, Anderson Silva, and that old so-and-so Donald Cerrone. Should be fun.

Got a question of your own? On the Twitter at @BenFowlkesMMA is the place for it. But you already knew that.

Not surprisingly, some form of this question showed up a lot in this week’s TMB submissions. People are understandably confused about how a positive test for cocaine could result in no official reprimand whatsoever, whereas positive tests for marijuana have cost fighters wins, bonuses, and even jobs. The big difference between what happened with Jones and what happened with fighters like Matt Riddle, Nick Diaz, and Pat Healy is that the reefer-lovers on this list were nabbed by fight night drug tests. They were considered “in-competition” at the time of the tests, which means the list of banned substances is a lot longer.

Jones, on the other hand, was tested a month before the bout, at a time when he was considered “out-of-competition,” which is when cocaine is, according to the Nevada State Athletic Commission, not a banned substance. Of course, that forces us to ask why the commission bothered testing for it at all. Right now it seems like the NSAC is wondering the same thing.

Where things get weird is when you consider the practical application of these in and out-of-competition distinctions. Unless you’re a really heavy user, cocaine metabolites usually aren’t detectable after more than a few days following the last use. Marijuana metabolites, on the other hand, can remain detectable in drug tests a lot longer, meaning that some of these fighters who pop positive for it “in-competition” actually stopped using well before – sometimes weeks before – the competition itself.

So yes, when you look at it like that, it does start to seem unfair. But then we return to the question, what do we want the NSAC and/or the UFC to do about it? With Jones, they seemed to catch his cocaine use on accident, and in circumstances where they had no clear protocol for what was supposed to happen next. Pulling him from the fight may have resulted in a legal challenge. Then again, what if Jones really did have a serious cocaine problem, and both the UFC and NSAC had documentation of that problem, yet did nothing about it? What if he’d gone out against Daniel Cormier at UFC 182 and gotten himself hurt? What if he’d had a heart attack in the cage? You think the NSAC and UFC are in hot water now, just imagine if that worst-case scenario had come to pass on live TV.

That’s the other issue that’s surfaced now that the initial shock of the cocaine revelation has worn off and we’ve actually seen the paperwork from Jones’ tests. In those tests, Jones’ testosterone-to-epistestosterone ratio was “odd,” according to anti-doping experts. Not odd as in high, like we saw with guys like Alistair Overeem. We’re talking odd as in abnormally low, which may indicate some manipulation of his levels to mask performance-enhancing drug use.

Of course, that “may” is important here. You can’t say definitively that that’s what caused the low numbers – not unless you do the carbon isotope ratio (CIR) test to be sure.

As far as we know, the NSAC didn’t do that test. It typically doesn’t do it unless the ratio is above its 6-1 threshold, so while these low numbers may be suspicious to anti-doping experts, that’s apparently not enough to trigger more testing from the NSAC. It should be, though, because right now the NSAC has a major credibility problem. Between the confusion over what it was supposed to test for and when, plus the conflicting statements made this week by various commission members, the NSAC is in danger of losing our trust for good. That would be a problem not just for one of the sport’s most important regulatory bodies – like it or not, the NSAC tends to set the standard that other athletic commissions follow – but also for the UFC, which likes to point to commissions like the one in Nevada as evidence that it is regulated by “the government.”

Think about UFC President Dana White’s recent statement about scrapping plans for an internal testing program, opting instead to give money to state athletic commissions to further their testing capabilities. Now think about how much confidence you have in the commission that just caught a fighter using a drug it didn’t mean to test for, then kept that result secret while failing to do the reasonable follow-up testing in search of the substances it was trying to find. Do you really feel like having the UFC write those people a check is the answer we need? Because I don’t.

This is the same argument we’ve been having about marijuana in MMA for years. If the drug has any potential upside, or so the thinking goes, it must be performance-enhancing. Marijuana helps you relax or expand your mind or even just alleviate pain? Boom, it’s a PED. Cocaine helps you burn fat or workout like a maniac or feel like you can conquer the world? Also a PED. How about LSD, which might make a fighter believe his face his melting, thus making him less concerned about subjecting it to damage in a fight? Lucy in the sky with PEDs, brother.

Let’s be real, though. I think we’d all rather fight a guy who’s been snorting cocaine throughout his training camp as opposed to one who’s been shooting testosterone, and we all know why. Recreational drugs might confer some benefits, and some of those benefits might even carry over into sports, in a very limited, tangential capacity. Still, we all know it’s not on the same level as a drug whose sole purpose is to improve your strength or speed or recovery or cardio, all with the aim of making you better at your sport. What’s more, there are a lot of performance-enhancing drugs out there, and they’re not all banned. The mere fact that a drug helps isn’t the only thing that lands it on the banned list.

As for what should count as “out-of-competition,” that is a tricky issue for a sport where the two months before the contest are arguably the most important time, as far as drug testing is concerned. The major PEDs are all banned both in and out-of-competition, but we still set a thorny precedent by telling fighters they aren’t subject to certain expectations even when they’re in the vital phase of their training. The NSAC might also inadvertently limit its own reach by drawing that line too carelessly, and I don’t see who that helps.

The UFC did know, and it didn’t do anything. It would argue that it couldn’t, that Jones had a right to fight, positive cocaine test or no. Then again, UFC President Dana White also said that his primary concern is Jones’ health and recovery. But if that were true, and if he had reason to suspect that Jones had a cocaine problem severe enough to require a stint in rehab, why didn’t he at least make an effort to stop him from stepping into the cage with a very dangerous man?

We’ve already covered the ways in which this could have gone very wrong. Even if you’re worried that the guy will sue you if you yank him out of the fight, there’s no indication that the UFC even tried to get Jones to reconsider this fight over concerns about his health and safety. Right now it looks like both the UFC and the NSAC were concerned primarily with making sure the fight took place as scheduled, so that the paydays for all involved could follow with it.

But enough of this. For now. For the sake of our sanity, let’s talk about something else for a little while.

You mean other than solidifying his standing as the rare fighter who actually means what others say when they claim that they’ll fight anybody at any time? For Donald Cerrone, I see a lot of upsides to stepping in against Benson Henderson. For one, it gives him the chance to avenge his earlier losses. For another, he makes more money, which seems very, very important to him. If he wins, he also gains a sort of irrefutable momentum that might land him in a title shot due to sheer gameness and force of attitude. And if he loses? He shrugs it off and says, hell, he was just trying to stay busy and get paid between Budweiser binges. Who will hold that against him?

You could argue that this approach has kept Cerrone from a UFC title shot. Anybody who fights that often in the lightweight division is going to lose one now and then. There’s also the very real possibility that he’s decreasing his chances of victory by taking tough fights on short notice, when his body may not be fully healed from the last one.

Still, there’s another aspect to all this that we have to consider in light of Cerrone’s admissions about his struggles with the mental game in the past. The thing that seems to bother him the most is the anticipation, the waiting around to fight and the thinking about fighting as he’s waiting around. By turning right around and jumping into another one before he can give it too much thought, he may feel like he’s solving his own problem. Will the results prove him right? I guess we’ll see. At the moment, I’m mostly concerned about his plan to drive an RV to Boston in the middle of a brutal winter.

If I’ve learned one thing from Facebook, it’s that the people who can’t stop telling everyone about all the gym time they’re logging are usually the ones who are actually doing the least. And if that’s the case, I don’t see why the reverse can’t be true.

To be honest, one thing I never worry about with Nick Diaz is that he’s not in the gym. The man is something of a workout junkie. You could tell me that his heart might not be in this fight, that he’s just out for a paycheck, and that he’ll swiftly disappear again as soon as it’s all over, and yeah, I’d probably buy that. But tell me that he’s sitting on the couch eating Cheetos instead of working out, and that’s when I am forced to call shenanigans, as Gabe Ruediger might say. Diaz would be working out in some form even if he didn’t have a fight. Maybe he’s just not the kind of guy who needs all of Instagram to know about it every time he breaks a sweat.

What happens, you ask? His fans cry. His haters rejoice. The UFC reconsiders the marketing strategy that led it to act like the other guy in the main event didn’t even exist. The sky does not come crashing down, in other words. McGregor would pop right back up, likely with some fresh new sound bites, and the UFC would still be more interested in promoting him than Dennis Siver.

But McGregor losing here is unlikely. Probably what will happen is he’ll be too quick and too powerful for Siver, who will take his beating with all the steely stoicism we’ve come to expect from him before ultimately getting knocked out in the later rounds. Then McGregor will parade around Boston draped in the Irish flag while a stone-faced Jose Aldo looks on with weary eyes that have looked into the future and found no cause for concern. Or, you know, something like that.