Twitter Mailbag: Can McGregor play mind games with a Diaz brother?

Conor McGregor

In this week’s Twitter Mailbag, how will the mental warfare shape up in the UFC 196 main event? And what important lessons did we learn about officiating from UFC Fight Night 84? Also, are post-fight appeals ever a good idea?

To ask a question of your own, tweet it to @BenFowlkesMMA, preferably on a Wednesday.

There are two kinds of mind games: The kind that take place before the fight, and the kind that take place in the fight.

I think Jose Aldo was affected, whether he’ll admit it or not, by the former. How could he not be? He spent months listening to Conor McGregor run his mouth. Then when they finally got in the cage together, he couldn’t stop himself from running straight at the man in a reckless moment that proved to be his undoing. You can’t tell me McGregor didn’t incite that attack at least somewhat with his sustained campaign of taunts and threats.

Then there’s McGregor’s fight with Chad Mendes. Since Mendes was a late replacement, there wasn’t much chance for a trash talk war (you know, aside from that one time where McGregor speculated about how his own genitals and Mendes would match up in terms of height). Mendes just showed up and fought, seemingly with nothing to lose.

But, as Mendes admitted after the TKO loss, there was something about the way McGregor kept talking – even when Mendes was dominating the fight early on. In the post-fight press conference Mendes even gave McGregor some credit for that, saying he “never stopped talking (expletive) the entire time.”

Of course, Nate Diaz may not even hear it during the fight since he’ll likely be too busy talking some (expletive) of his own. If the plan is to make Diaz so mad he fights poorly, I doubt it will work. Those guys always fight mad. They want to fight mad. What they seem to hate more than anything is an opponent who’s too buddy-buddy, which also makes them mad.

Will it matter? I don’t think so. I think what will matter most is speed and precision. McGregor moves fast and makes every shot count. Diaz tries to overwhelm opponents with volume, baiting them into standing there too long and trying to win exchanges that they’re better off avoiding. Diaz could change the calculation if he got the fight to the mat, but I don’t see him doing that. He rarely even tries.

Instead, I see Diaz flexing and posing, sticking his mean mug out and daring McGregor to hit it. I see McGregor obliging him, then getting out of the way before Diaz’s counter combos can even get off the launchpad.

Nearly knocking out Michael Bisping and then ultimately losing a pretty close decision to him doesn’t tell me that Anderson Silva needs to hurry up and retire. The way the fight unfolded did, however, tell me that Silva’s fighting style has not evolved to meet the capabilities and limitations of his new, old body.

He’s just not that guy anymore. He’s not the guy who can stand there with his hands down, dodging punches like he’s fighting from three seconds into the future, then fire back with laser-guided strikes that leave his opponents in rubble. Those days are gone, and they aren’t coming back – unless he fights other old guys who are also not what they once were.

My guess is that’s exactly what waits in his future. Call it “fun fights,” call it an effective one-upping of Bellator’s senior tour, whatever. Silva’s best bet for continuing success is a series of mostly meaningless, but stubbornly compelling fights against his aged contemporaries. On a totally unrelated note, I hear Chael Sonnen’s suspension ends soon…

You ready for my crazy, unprovable and unfalsifiable theory about MouthpieceGate? Here it is: Bisping would have had a better chance of getting a timeout and a mouthpiece replacement if he had never even acknowledged that he’d lost his mouthpiece.

Referees don’t like fighters telling them what to do. They don’t like to let them call their own fouls, or initiate pauses in the action. It makes them feel like they’re getting played. Better to let the ref think it was all his idea.

So when Bisping kept trying to tell Herb Dean to stop the fight and give him back his mouthpiece, Dean reflexively pushed back. You tell the ref to do something, he’s going to tell you to shut up and keep fighting. Meanwhile, here comes your opponent with a flying knee to your dome.

Should the ref call time and replace the mouthpiece? Yes, but only when there’s a natural break in the action. Otherwise, spitting out your mouthpiece becomes a way to halt your opponent’s momentum while you grab a quick breath. That’s why it has to be left up to the referee. If you want him to do his job, your best bet might be not to tell him how to do it.

As listeners of the Co-Main Event Podcast know, I was totally into how referee Marc Goddard handled the repeated fouls by Marlon Vera in last weekend’s UFC Fight Night 84 bout against Davey Grant. Specifically, I appreciated that Goddard a) took the time to think about where the most logical position for a restart was after each foul, and b) how, when he’d finally had enough, Goddard took a point from Vera without even pausing the action.

It’s part A that’s proved elusive for many MMA refs, though. The impulse is to stop the fight, put the fighters in neutral corners, deduct a point (or, more likely, issue a stern verbal warning), then restart the fighters on their feet. In this way, a fighter who’s committing fouls while stuck on his back might get rewarded for his behavior rather penalized. And even if it costs him a point to get back to his feet, what does it matter if he knocks the other guy out after the restart?

At times, Goddard restarted the fight where it was. At other points he stood them up. Finally, he didn’t interfere at all, but just took the point and let the fighters keep going. And, in that situation, why not? The judges are the ones who need to do the math on their scorecards. The fighters have other concerns.

I’m not saying there are no instances where a losing fighter can make a legitimate claim for overturning the results. What I am saying is that even in those rare instances, it almost never works. Fighters must know this, right? Or at least, their representatives must know it. So why go through with it anyway?

Part of it is, I think a lot of managers/coaches/friends/handlers don’t want to tell fighters no. If the fighter says he was screwed, they say yes, absolutely you were. He wants to do something about it, fine. They’ll help put an appeal together, knowing it will go nowhere. They do it for the fighter’s ego.

The fighter does it for the same reason. Remember when we talked about the not insignificant role that post-loss excuses play in the fighter mentality? This is like that. It’s also why we see so much more grumbling about filing an appeal than we do of actual appeals. It’s easy to talk, and sometimes it fulfills the purpose. Paperwork, on the other hand, is a real pain in the neck.

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