Twitter Mailbag: Do fans fully appreciate Robert Whittaker's streak, even without a unified title?

Do fans fully appreciate the awesomeness of the winning streak that “Bobby Knuckles” is on? How about Bob Lawler’s evolving brawlerhood headed into Saturday’s UFC on FOX 26 main event? And what’s on our MMA Christmas wish list?

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

Good question, and thanks for putting that in the proper perspective. While Michael Bisping was running around with that shiny belt draped over his shoulder, Robert Whittaker has been putting in steady, solid work against the best in the division, and all as a 26-year-old former welterweight.

That’s the good news for the fractured middleweight title picture that Georges St-Pierre left in his wake. We may never get to see a true title unification bout, but you can still throw “Bobby Knuckles” in there with Luke Rockhold and, no matter how it turns out, I won’t find it hard to believe that the winner is the best middleweight on the planet.

• A Conor McGregor title defense, mostly so people will stop writing into this mailbag with questions about when it’s going to happen and why he hasn’t been stripped of the belt yet.

• A solemn vow to let the Stipe Miocic vs. Francis Ngannou UFC heavyweight title bout proceed as planned, with no funny business.

• Book Shane Carwin as the world’s most terrifying alternate in the Bellator heavyweight grand prix.

• Stop making each UFC Fight Night on FS1 feel like a marathon of commercials and commentary and joyless filler. Watching one pro sporting event on TV shouldn’t take more than six hours.

• Demetrious Johnson vs. T.J. Dillashaw, either at a catchweight or at 135 pounds. And pay “Mighty Mouse” his asking price for that fight. Not only will it help the fight seem like a bigger deal, but man, you know he’s earned it by now.

Sure, there are a lot of UFC fights coming together that make good, unimpeachable sense from a rankings perspective. But the issue was never that the UFC refused to match up the No. 6 welterweight with the No. 5. That’s the level at which the UFC matchmakers are mostly allowed to do their jobs unimpeded, and they typically do excellent work.

The problem was always more at the top, with the relatively few big draws that the UFC shuffled around selectively in order to maximize profitability. That’s how we ended up with most of the perplexing match-ups from recent years. They were short-term cash grabs.

The problem is, those don’t happen in a vacuum. That No. 5 welterweight? The one who’s been working toward a title shot? He sees what goes on at the top, what the big paydays are really made of these days. Can you blame him if he receives the message loud and clear?

That’s at least a seven, even if I have to admit I’m surprised that, of all the awesome Robbie Lawler moments to highlight in advance of his UFC on FOX 26 main event bout with Rafael dos Anjos, it’s his defensive work that we’re focusing on.

Why, we could just as easily look back to one of my favorite Lawler moments, back when he mostly failed to check kicks against Melvin Manhoef, then limped around the cage after he left Manhoef asleep and drooling blood on the mat anyway.

What really interests me about Saturday’s fight is the question of how these styles will match up. The non-stop motor and high-pressure approach of a fighter like dos Anjos could, in theory, work well against a fighter like Lawler, who’s been known to pace himself for the later rounds.

Then again, does RDA really have the chin to keep running up in Bob Lawler’s face for 25 minutes? I really don’t know, but I can’t wait to find out.

Fining a fighter for an incredibly minor weigh-in shove seems extreme to me. For one thing, weigh-ins are pure promotional theater – especially now that the actual weigh-ins usually happen earlier in the day, without the face-offs and the photo ops. For another, whether we want to admit it or not we like and reward and encourage stuff like that in this sport, and we have for years. Now suddenly it gets you fined? That feels unfair.

As for the finger bite, yes it was a foul. Yes, a pretty unique one. But Jason Knight was punished with a point deduction immediately after it happened, which feels like the right call. I could see a more stringent punishment if Gabriel Benitez had been seriously hurt by it, but he wasn’t. And if we start issuing suspensions and fines after the fact for all the rule-breaking that goes on in a typical MMA fight, where do we even stop?

Really? You ask me this on a Mike Perry fight week? Feels like a set-up.

But then I have to ask myself, which kind of problematic are we talking about here? Because if we just mean a guy with questionable friendships and bad social media posts who also seems to walk through life like he’s actively trying to embody all that is bro, then sure, the guy with his nickname tattooed on his face works. He’s a whole lot of fun to watch, even if something about him does feel, as my podcast co-host Chad Dundas put it, like a guilty pleasure.

But there are lots of ways to be problematic in this sport. I mean, Jon Jones broke a pregnant woman’s arm in a hit-and-run accident. Anderson Silva can’t seem to pass a drug test. Even McGregor seems to have joined some sort of “Scandal of the Month” club.

Then there are all the other ways for MMA fighters to make us feel gross for supporting them. They get mad and toss off an anti-gay slur, or get on Twitter and post some Sandy Hook truther nonsense, and suddenly it’s a little harder to like them.

Partly it’s a consequence of the times we live in. Imagine if Mickey Mantle had hit the town in the era of smart phones. Just picture the crap Babe Ruth would have posted to Twitter. What kind of Facebook page would Walter Payton have had?

Whether it’s a famous fighter or a high school acquaintance, we know a lot more about each other’s lives and beliefs and fleeting, unvetted thoughts than people used to. That’s not always a good thing.

I’m definitely into the budding, organic rivalry between Perry and Darren Till, but I think you’d have a hard time convincing The Fifth Beatle to take a fight with the loser of Saturday night’s UFC on FOX 26 match-up. If Santiago Ponzinibbio wins that, he becomes the man to beat, at least on paper.

And since Till seems to have some savvy target selection for the purposes of getting himself noticed and moving up the ranks, I think he’s smart enough to realize that he could let the Perry feud simmer and revisit it later, should they find themselves on more equal footing.

I see your point. Fewer pay-per-view events would probably mean better pay-per-view events, plus it would make it easier and more economical to be an MMA fan. But the question is, how many more buys per event would the UFC have to sell to make such a switch worthwhile?

Right now, UFC pay-per-views are either huge or extremely mediocre, at least in terms of sales. Either you have a blockbuster card that edges toward the million-buy (or more) mark, or you’re doing a few hundred thousand (or less) with the usual suspects. That’s a viable strategy for now, but if you cut the number of events in half, suddenly you can’t afford a lackluster event with lackluster results.

There’s also the question of how to make the math work with the size of the current roster. It’s already a struggle for the UFC to find fights for everyone it has under contract. If you decrease the number of events, that goes from difficult to impossible. And if you don’t decrease the total number of events, but just make fewer of them pay-per-views, what do you do with the others?

That might be a question that the next TV deal will address, in one way or another. But something tells me that whoever ends up paying for UFC broadcast rights is going to want more say in what goes where.

I’m sure the UFC wants to keep a guy like Cub Swanson around – but at what price? That’s going to be the issue, especially coming off a loss that will likely stunt his title hopes. This is the type of situation where the UFC typically likes to lowball a fighter, using his recent past against him and forgetting all the work he put in before that.

Try that with Swanson, though, and he might just take his legitimately dope and easily transferable personal brand over to Bellator, where he’d no doubt be very welcome.

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