Nearly five months after Mayweather vs. McGregor, and we're still arguing about pay-per-view sales?

Nearly five months after one of the biggest fights in combat sports history we’re still finding ways to argue about it. And by we, I mostly mean some of the principal players involved, the guys who went home with all the money in the end, which is part of what makes this really bizarre.

It started, hilariously enough, with a press release. Last month Showtime put out an official release that pegged sales for the Floyd Mayweather-Conor McGregor fight at 4.3 million pay-per-view buys in North America. That number, the release noted, “nearly (doubled) the 2.48 million buys for Oscar De La Hoya vs. Mayweather in 2007.”

In other words, it was an incredibly successful fight, at least in commercial terms. But that’s apparently not good enough for UFC President Dana White.

In an interview with Yahoo! Sports recently, White complained about Showtime – and about boxing promoters in general, who he says do a bad job of promoting their own sport.

“I don’t give a (expletive) about Showtime’s (expletive) full-of-(expletive) press release they put out,” White said. “It’s the biggest fight ever in combat sports history. The thing did over 6.7 million buys, and if the service didn’t drop, we would have got closer to seven million. It was the biggest event ever. It was the biggest boxing event ever, without a boxer. It was only one boxer involved in the fight.”

Espinoza responded on Twitter, putting forth the hypothesis that “telling the truth” is what really got under White’s skin. That was all the invitation that McGregor needed to join the fray, repeating the accusations of weasel-dom that came to typify his interactions with the Showtime crew during the lead-up to the fight.

It’s a ridiculous argument to have at this point, and a counter-productive one. It smacks of insecurity and fragile egos. Not content to simply be among the best-selling fights of all time, they have to lay claim to the top spot – whether or not the numbers support it.

And arguing about the veracity of those numbers only gets you so far. As Espinoza pointed out in a follow-up interview on SiriusXM, Showtime doesn’t have the UFC’s freedom when it comes to bragging about pay-per-view sales.

“The one thing I’ll point out – I don’t want to get too much into a back-and-forth – but we’re a public company and there are regulations, there are legal requirements,” Espinoza said. “We can’t put out press releases giving fake numbers. We have shareholders. We have millions of shareholders. When we put something on it, when we say, ‘Here’s a Showtime Sports press release from Mayweather-Pacquiao or Mayweather-McGregor,’ that has gone through lawyers and everyone has looked at it. It’s factual.”

In other words, what we’re looking at here is a battle between receipts and just saying stuff.

But why pick a fight over this? And why now? Everyone agrees that the Mayweather-McGregor fight was a huge success. The same Showtime release that White compared to livestock excrement also claimed that the bout generated over $600 million in global revenue. That’s literally more than the GDP of some small island nations. And this is something you want to argue about?

I could understand it if there were actual money at stake. If you thought Showtime was holding out on you, sure, audit the numbers and get every last cent you’re owed. But if it’s just a public perception battle, what’s the point?

White’s word isn’t exactly gold these days, so it’s unlikely that he’s going to convince anyone who doesn’t actively want to be convinced.

McGregor’s army starts out from a place of total acceptance, so they can be won over. But then, he could also tell them that he’s a direct descendant of Hercules and they’d rush to social media to flame anyone who disagreed.

Espinoza is the one who comes off as the level-headed adult in the room, calmly shaking his head at the two guys screaming that they’re the best ever.

If the goal was to draw a striking contrast between how they do things in boxing versus how it’s done in MMA, mission accomplished. If the goal was to come out on the better end of that comparison, yeah, not so much.

For complete coverage of “The Money Fight: Floyd Mayweather vs. Conor McGregor,” check out the MMA Events section of the site.