Don't look now, but the McGregor Effect is spreading – and we haven't seen the end of it yet

Jon Jones explained it in a way that everyone could understand. Sitting there in Anaheim, Calif., after knocking out Daniel Cormier in UFC 214’s pay-per-view main event, he told us exactly why he’d rather spend a move up to heavyweight fighting Brock Lesnar, a middle-aged part-timer, instead of Stipe Miocic, the actual heavyweight champion.

“Conor McGregor, he has been a tremendous inspiration to me,” Jones said. “He has shown me, who has been at the upper echelon of this sport for many years now, he has shown me that these huge paydays are possible. I never thought in my time as champion that we would be able to see fighters making $70 million or whatever he’s making for this (Floyd Mayweather) fight. It’s an inspiration that you can do it. I see it as possible, and that’s what McGregor has done for me.”

Jones isn’t the only one feeling the McGregor effect. Just look at Miocic. You think he’s bummed about Jones looking past him toward a potentially bigger paycheck against a lesser heavyweight? Hardly. He’s playing a similar game, calling out heavyweight boxing champ Anthony Joshua in a copycat bid to replicate McGregor’s crossover payday for himself.

If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then McGregor must be feeling the love right about now. The fight is still three weeks away, the money is still mostly hypothetical, and already some of the best fighters in the world are trying to follow where he leads.

Can you blame them? This is prizefighting, after all. “Prize” comes first.

But it’s not just fighters who feel the effects of a seismic shift like this one. For McGregor (a man with zero professional boxing experience) to even book a fighter with Mayweather (the best boxer of his generation), perceptions needed to change. People needed a way to feel like they had permission to want what they wanted, whether it made sense or not.

McGregor gave them that with his actual accomplishments in the UFC – which, people outside the MMA bubble seem to forget, actually are unprecedented, both in terms of belts and box offices – but also with the force of his personality.

He might be the only fighter who can convince his fans, without even really trying, that the absence of information about his boxing game is itself a strength. Because, hey, if we’ve never seen the guy in a boxing match, how do we know he isn’t already the best in the world?

But it’s not just the McGregor faithful who have been roped in here. People want this fight, this clash of sports and ideas and worlds and celebrities. The more you tell them that it’s likely to be ridiculous, the more intent they are on watching it. That’s because ridiculous, when done on a large enough scale, is historic. A small farce is pathetic. A massive one is a cultural moment.

Once we accept and normalize the idea, then a lot of things change. Suddenly that Miocic-Joshua bout doesn’t seem so absurd. And Jones-Lesnar? That’s reasonable almost to the point of being required. Sure, one’s a pro wrestler on a drug suspension and the other’s the greatest MMA fighter alive, but at least they both have experience in the same sport.

And admit it, we’d all watch the hell out of a Jones-Lesnar fight. Demetrious Johnson could fight every UFC flyweight in a public park on the same night, and we’d go sprinting past with our credit cards held high just to see Jones bounce a spinning elbow off Lesnar’s cinderblock skull. It’s a pairing just weird enough to capture our attention and our curiosity, both of which are more reliable drivers of pay-per-view revenue than any promise of meaningful athletic competition.

Is that a bad thing? I don’t know. The UFC has spread its brand far and wide, flooding the market with cheap combat-sports action. If you just want to see two people in a desperate struggle for money and supremacy inside a cage, there’s no need to pay. It’s on TV in airport bars. It’s on YouTube and basic cable. Any given weekend you can channel surf your way into it without even trying, so how’s the UFC supposed to convince you to drop a couple steak dinners worth of cash on any one event?

Capturing the power of the spectacle is one way. But we develop a tolerance for that over time. You have to make it louder, bigger, dumber. If we’re not arguing about whether or not it should be allowed to happen, then you’re not even in the ballpark. In this way, the mile markers of normalcy keep marching over the horizon.

But the thing to remember about the shift spurred on by McGregor is that we can’t see the big picture yet. If he gets so thoroughly trashed by Mayweather that we all go away hating ourselves for the part we played in it, the next MMA fighter to try calling out a big name boxer is in for a much harder sell. And if the PPV receipts don’t match expectations, the incentive to wade through the same river of crap in order to try it all again diminishes considerably.

That’s what makes this fight feel even more like an important cultural moment, somehow. It’s a test of what the market will bear. This is us checking the gauges on our own desire for big, crazy, sports-themed train wrecks. Clearly, the fighters and promoters are paying attention.

For more on “The Money Fight: Floyd Mayweather vs. Conor McGregor,” check out the MMA Rumors section of the site.