Twitter Mailbag: UFC 207 is almost here, so where's Ronda Rousey?

In this week’s Twitter Mailbag, will skipping press conferences become the newest cool thing to do in the UFC? And what will we remember Mike Goldberg for, once he’s gone from our lives? Plus, who should replace him, and why doesn’t it seem like the people in charge have a good answer for that?

All that and much more in this pre-UFC 207 TMB. To ask a question of your own, tweet it to @BenFowlkesMMA.

According to Dana White, this sets no precedent. Fighters still have to do media, even if Ronda Rousey didn’t. They’ll still get pulled from a fight card for no-showing the press conference, even though Rousey (12-1 MMA, 6-1 UFC) wasn’t. The rules are different for her, in case we haven’t noticed already.

If there’s a precedent being set here, it’s that. Not that you can specifically avoid media if you don’t feel like doing it, but that you can become a big enough star that the normal rules don’t apply.

But this is how the UFC has operated for a long time. There are no set rules. Not on anything. The answer to the question of what happens if you skip press conferences or shove refs or get arrested or spout off on social media always depends less on what you do than on who you are. If you’re valuable and the UFC likes you, a certain leeway is granted. If you’re not, then it isn’t.

What I wonder is why it was so important to Rousey to avoid media responsibilities for this fight. I get it when it’s six weeks out and you’d rather be in the gym than hitting the morning talk show circuit, but fight week is different. If it’s because she doesn’t want her focus disrupted by questions about her last loss and her reaction to it, that suggests a certain psychological fragility that her opponent could possibly target. If it’s because she wants payback on a media that she feels was unfair to her, then it just seems misguided.

Rousey’s approach to this fight is one of several factors that will probably hurt sales in the end. A Friday night, the day before New Year’s Eve, and the second-biggest star in the company refuses to get out there and remind people that there’s a fight for sale on their TVs? That ain’t good.

Maybe she feels like she’s got enough money that she doesn’t care. But if you’re Amanda Nunes (13-4 MMA, 6-1 UFC), and you’re depending on getting a cut of a blockbuster pay-per-view to change your financial future, I could see being a little upset that the challenger won’t do her part.

That’s the collateral damage of Rousey’s media blackout, and the UFC’s decision to focus almost entirely on her when hyping UFC 207. If you’re a casual fan and you managed to find out, somehow, that Rousey is fighting on Friday night, you probably know next to nothing about who she’s fighting.

The UFC has made almost no effort to push Nunes since her upset victory at UFC 200, leaving her as a sort of forgotten champion heading into what should have been a monster pay-per-view.

If she beats Rousey and retains her title, you’d like to think that would all change. Certainly it will change how fans think of her. No one has successfully defended the women’s 135-pound belt since Rousey. If Nunes pulls it off, it will probably only increase the odds that Rousey disappears from MMA, possibly for good. With Miesha Tate retired and Holly Holm moving up a division, who else can you push if not Nunes? You might even wish you’d started sooner.

The Dana White pre- and post-fight media scrums used to be some of the most reliably interesting/entertaining/informative parts of a UFC fight week. For 30-45 minutes you had the UFC president just tossing off tidbits and hot takes, often at considerable volume, sometimes with his face changing color before your very eyes.

You could push his buttons and he’d push back. You could dig for news and he’d either give it up or else try to clamp down on it so obviously that you knew there was more to the story. It was great.

For all those same reasons, I can totally understand why he stopped doing them. In retrospect, it’s kind of amazing that the tradition lasted as long as it did. How many nights was he still sitting there an hour after the post-fight press conference ended, which likely meant two or three hours after the event wrapped up? And yet there he was, shirt unbuttoned at the collar, ready to yell at the first reporter to bring up drug testing.

Obviously, the reason White revived the scrums this week was to fill some of the void left by Rousey’s absence. If you want to create enough buzz to remind people that there’s a fight coming up, somebody has to go out there and give the reporters something to write about. And apparently it ain’t going to be the star of the show this time.

I doubt too many of us will mourn the absence of Mike Goldberg on future UFC broadcasts, but it does feel like the end of an era, doesn’t it?

No more listening to him mispronounce fighters’ names. No more of him shouting that it is allllll over, even when it’s not. No more weird statements that Joe Rogan has to immediately refute. No more of his rote speech patterns, where whether he’s describing a fighter’s recent performances or the host city’s most recognizable monument, his inflection is always “virtually identical.”

As you can probably tell, I never thought Goldberg was great at his job. Still, his departure feels like one more sign of the changing times. The UFC will no longer just do whatever it wants, for as long as it wants, even as its fans clamor for something different. The new owners have put a stop to those days, and it’s probably for the best.

And yet, I’m sure some dumb part of me will find a way to look back with fondness on the Goldie-Rogan era. He was there for some of the sport’s greatest moments. Even if he was probably busy trying to squeeze in an ad read for some action movie at the time.

This can’t be true. I know people keep saying it. And some of them are credible people who might actually know. But come on. Someone please tell me that this is just the bad idea you float so that, later on, the good idea seems downright genius. Please?

And the good idea, obviously, is to promote Jon Anik to the top play-by-play spot. He’s done an excellent job on the UFC’s backup team, which is in many ways preferable to the pay-per-view team. He’s a familiar face to fans. He’s a trusted voice who doesn’t mess up much, and he’s actually an MMA guy. He cares about the sport and has been following it for years. How many other experienced broadcasters can say that?

That’s why I don’t get the Jim Rome talk. He doesn’t have a ton of live play-by-play experience in any sport, much less this one. He’s more suited for a color commentary role, and he’s not even very suited for that. He’s a polarizing figure who would probably cost more than the guy he’d be replacing, which would be a strange move for new owners looking to cut costs.

Most importantly, he’d probably just be really, really annoying to listen to event after event. I’m still hoping for cooler heads to prevail, and for Anik to be the pick in the end.

I don’t think it’s the UFC, if only because Dominick Cruz was never a huge draw, and has in fact probably only gotten better in that regard due to his absence and his comeback story.

I also don’t think it’s the fans, because it’s not like there was some perfect match-up we never got to see all because Cruz (22-1 MMA, 5-0 UFC) was injured. He fought his biggest bantamweight rivals. He beat them. We just had to wait a little while.

That only leaves Cruz, who lost money and years off his career during his injury struggles. But when you hear him talk about what he learned during that difficult time, you get the sense that it wasn’t all for nothing. It does seem to have made him mentally stronger, as well as more mature. You just have to wonder if it’s worth all the lost cash in the end.

You said it. As a person, it’s hard not to like Josh Barnett . He’s smart and funny and generous and engaging. You want to see good things happen to a guy like that. But no one has done more harm to his own career and his own reputation than Barnett (35-8 MMA, 7-3 UFC) has with his history of failed drug tests.

We have yet to hear all the facts in this case, and these “potential” violations have been known to change shape under scrutiny, but at this point it fits with a certain pattern. And that pattern sucks.

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