Twitter Mailbag: Bellator's big night, Conor McGregor's interplanetary fame and more

Who would be the ideal representative to represent MMA against a top boxer? What happens if Conor McGregor actually beats Floyd Mayweather? Is Bellator NYC creating enough of its own buzz, or looking too much like a UFC knockoff?

All that and more in this week’s Twitter Mailbag. To ask a question of your own, tweet to @BenFowlkesMMA.

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It’s tricky, because Bellator wants to appeal to UFC fans but at the same time has to be careful not to come off looking like UFC Lite. It also needs fighters who fans know, but can’t rely exclusively on UFC castoffs, most of whom only struck out for new territory when it became clear that they’d gone as far as they could go in the UFC.

So what’s specifically Bellator about this fight card? Where’s the signature touch?

It’s headlined by two old guys with a grudge that’s more fun to hear about than it probably will be to see, so that’s pretty Bellator-ish. It’s got Fedor Emelianenko and Scott Coker together again, but that actually feels more Strikeforce-ish. It’s got Michael Chandler defending his lightweight title against an undefeated challenger with a harrowing personal story, but Bellator itself has done very little to highlight any of that.

Judging by the amount of pre-fight buzz, this feels like another Bellator “tentpole” event. Which would be fine, except that there’s a difference between convincing people to watch some weird stuff on cable and convincing them to pay actual money for it.

Skill-wise, it’d be nice to have someone with more boxing experience, like Chris Lytle. He had 15 fights as a pro boxer and only one loss. He tried to set up a fight with Roy Jones Jr. at some point, and once even told me it was the one thing he’d come out of retirement for, but of course it never happened because who’d be crazy enough to put an MMA fighter in there with a legendary boxer, right?

As far as handling all the pre-fight stuff, there’s no one better than Conor McGregor. He’s got a weird charisma that makes people want to look at and listen to him. He has that natural ability to speak in quotes, seemingly creating catchphrases as he talks. He sometimes takes the trash-talk too far, but he’s never boring.

That’s a good thing, since pre-fight hype is the bulk of his job here.

Still, I think guys like Lytle would tell you that boxing is a different game. It’s not just a question of whether you know how to throw a punch. The strategy and the techniques, the pace and the distance, those are all important aspects of the sport that take time to learn. Floyd Mayweather’s been learning them all his life, and he’s a master of them.

It’s the other stuff – the sales pitch, the ability to maintain our interest all summer, the magic trick of convincing us that maybe, just maybe he could win – that McGregor really excels at. In that sense, he may be the perfect representative of MMA at this moment in time.

Well obviously the first thing that happens is the Irish tear apart Las Vegas, literally burn it to the ground as part of their celebration. Then we all wake up the next morning to headlines declaring boxing officially dead. McGregor owns it now, only he’s so rich he doesn’t need it, so he’s decided to shut it down. Oh well. It had a good run.

After that the seas boil and the mountains melt. Earth will become uninhabitable at that point, which makes it a fine time for NASA to announce that it constructed a series of secret escape pods for just such a possibility. Or, well, it was supposed to be a series of pods. Then, you know, budget cuts. So now it’s just one pod, and there’s no argument as to who should take it.

Fortunately, his victory over Mayweather has made him the most famous athlete on other planets as well as this one. As we watch him blast off into space, the fumes of a dying planet choking our lungs and burning our eyes, we tell ourselves that it’s fine, just fine. Wherever McGregor lands, he’s sure to be a star.

That’s a tough question, mainly because there are two different ways of asking it. There’s the question of when you’d be justified in turning down a challenger, and then there’s the question of when it would actually be a good idea (or at least not a terrible one).

Remember when Jon Jones did it, turning down Chael Sonnen as a very late replacement for the injured Dan Henderson at UFC 151? That was a reasonable decision to make at the time, and he got scorched for it. The UFC canceled the event and then scheduled a media call just to yell at Jones about it.

Jones was justified in making that decision, but being right didn’t save him from taking a beating in the court of public opinion. It didn’t keep him from slipping into an adversarial relationship with the UFC. If he hadn’t had the advantage of being the best fighter in the world, it might have been even worse.

I think that’s a clue to the answer we’re looking for here, honestly. When is it a great idea for a champion to turn down the UFC’s preferred challengers? Probably never. Not even when the preferred challenger has no real case for a title shot.

When you can do it anyway and get away with it? When you’re so good or so popular or even just so ensconced as champion that the UFC has no choice but to keep working with you anyway.

Whatever other wonderful qualities she might possess, Germaine de Randamie didn’t have that one going for her.

Don’t you talk about his mom! Don’t you ever talk about his mom!

I’ve seen it here and there over the years. I’ve even seen people disqualified for “timidity.” It’s just not a talk we’re used to hearing from the referee in UFC main events these days, simply because you don’t usually end up there if you’re feeling timid in the first place.

It’s a fine line for a referee to walk, and I thought Marc Goddard walked it well. He told both fighters that he “respect(ed) the game plan” but they still had to work. And what do you know, they did.

We don’t want to tell fighters that they are obligated to run face first into each other’s fists just to satisfy the blood lust of the masses. You get to have a strategy and a game plan and hopefully some defensive maneuvers with which to protect yourself.

At the same time, nobody’s here to watch you two stare at each other. We got enough of that at the dinner table with our parents growing up.

A logjam implies that there are a bunch of talented contenders with their path to the top blocked by some obstruction. What’s happening at women’s featherweight in the UFC is kind of the opposite: There’s a lack of talented contenders, so what few there are might have to go straight to the top before they’re ready.

Cristiane Justino isn’t yet the UFC women’s featherweight champion, even though it basically feels like she is. It was a division created for her, even if the UFC decided to hold the first title fight without her. (And just look at how that ended up.)

If and when she beats Invicta FC champ Megan Anderson to claim the UFC belt, what then? The UFC will have to go hunting for challengers, probably at bantamweight, offering them a choice between toiling for uncertain stakes at 135 pounds or experiencing the “Cyborg” smash at 145 pounds.

That isn’t a logjam, which is what happens when the logs all pile up on one another and block the way. This is more like the other thing that happens to logs, as in the ones that end up in the sawmill and march one after the other to the blade in an orderly fashion.

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