Twitter Mailbag: Is RDA UFC's best lightweight? Will 'Rampage' make it past court battle?

Rafael dos Anjos and Joanna Jedrzejczyk

In this week’s Twitter Mailbag, we’ll sort through a few lasting ripples on the pond after UFC 185, plus look ahead to Saturday night’s UFC Fight Night 62 event in Brazil.

Will there be time in there to discuss “Rampage” Jackson’s Bellator contract, and his odds of getting free of it in time to fight for the UFC next month? Probably, yeah.

You can ask your own question by directing it to @BenFowlkesMMA on Twitter. Angry rants also accepted.

Short answer: Nope. Slightly longer answer: No, but then I didn’t see Rafael dos Anjos beating Anthony Pettis, so maybe we should withhold judgment just a little while longer.

It’s true that dos Anjos looked better than we’ve ever seen him when he took the belt from Pettis. That he apparently did this on a bum knee makes him seem even more impressive.

Still, RDA’s loss to Khabib Nurmagomedov was not quite a year ago. I get that dos Anjos has improved since then, but it’s not like the first fight was all that close. That pressure style that RDA used against Pettis? Mixing in takedowns with the power strikes, forcing the champ back up against the fence and suffocating him there? That’s not so different from what Nurmagomedov did to dos Anjos. If we’re going to get into an US Weekly-style “Who Wore It Better?” contest, I still give the edge to your boy Nurmy.

That said, let’s not get ahead of ourselves just yet. Nurmagomedov still has a very tough fight with a very tough Donald Cerrone to worry about. He has to win that and stay healthy, just as dos Anjos has to rehab his knee before we can even begin breaking down fights that haven’t been scheduled yet. It’s just that, if you were to ask me right now who the best lightweight in the UFC is, I’m not sure I could tell you that it’s the guy with the belt around his waist. Not with any real confidence, anyway.

Bellator should absolutely up its drug-testing game. The UFC seems to agree, judging by Lorenzo Fertitta’s subtle remark at the recent press conference to address doping issues, at which the UFC CEO “encouraged” all MMA promotions to follow its lead with regards to enhanced out-of-competition testing.

As MMA’s no. 2 organization, it’s understandable for Bellator to think it can hang back and let the UFC go first with stuff like this. But if the UFC really does follow through on its promise to get a real testing program going, Bellator should do the same. You can’t tell us that you deserve to be considered among the top dogs if you aren’t willing to make that same level of commitment to actually improving the sport.

When I floated a similar theory on this week’s Co-Main Event Podcast, my co-host Chad Dundas accused me of being a tinfoil hat-wearing conspiracy theorist. But honestly, it doesn’t seem like such a wild possibility to me. Then again, it seems just as likely that Josh Koscheck completes this last night on his contract and then melts back into the scenery of northern California, content with retirement and the prospect of never again being struck on the head.

You look at Koscheck’s comments on MMAjunkie Radio, and you don’t exactly come away with the image of a man who is determined to fight on and eventually become a UFC champion. Instead, you get a guy who has decided not to decide just yet. You get a guy who is living for Saturday night, which might be the best way to approach things as a 37-year-old fighter with one fight left on a UFC contract.

Win or lose against Erick Silva, Koscheck has options. It’s just that he’ll have even more, not to mention twice the paycheck, if he can pull out one last win. The question is, would one more win only convince him that he’s not yet done?

I have no problem buying Ryan Benoit’s “heat of the moment” explanation, but I do have a problem with the UFC’s hazy standards on post-fight conduct.

First, consider Benoit’s situation. There he was, getting thoroughly tooled by Sergio Pettis, looking like he was headed for either a violent finish or 15-minute beatdown, and then he lands one big left hook that changes everything. The adrenaline must have been raging through his veins as he saw Pettis drop. When the ref moved in a few seconds later to call it off, you can forgive Benoit for riding the “eff yeah!” wave of emotions just a little too far, resulting in him giving Pettis’ backside a quick kick.

Was it uncalled for? Absolutely, and he quickly admitted as much. But come on, let’s not act like we haven’t seen plenty of fighters reach past a referee to land one more punch on a downed foe. It’s not like Benoit kicked Pettis in the face. It’s not even like he kept wrenching his knee, Rousimar Palhares-style, as the ref tried to pry his arms loose.

He got carried away. He apologized immediately. No harm done.

What I don’t get is how UFC officials can be so understanding about Benoit’s celebratory butt kick, but so strict about something like Jason High’s woozy referee shove. I get it, they’re not exactly equal, since one is a little extra oomph on an opponent, who shows up expecting to get hit, while the other involves laying hands on an official, whose safety must be zealously guarded, but still.

If we can understand how Benoit’s emotions might have gotten the better of him in a moment of triumph, why can’t we understand how High might have made a mistake after getting his brain smacked around? Why does one deserve nothing more than a disapproving glare while the other results in total banishment? I don’t get it. It’s not like either of them pulled a Paul Daley.

Roy Nelson is a 38-year-old heavyweight who has been criticized as too short, too slow, and too fat since the moment he broke on the scene. Still he won a heavyweight season of “The Ultimate Fighter” and stuck around in the UFC for the next six years, fighting almost every decent big man on the roster. He’s been beaten up by champions and mocked by the UFC president, but still, here he is, taking one tough fight after another and remaining something of a fan favorite despite a .500 record in the big show.

For a guy who didn’t start out with a whole lot of natural physical gifts, I’d say Nelson has done pretty well for himself. And if he seems to be falling off a bit now, hell, he’s almost 40. He’s also absorbed a record-breaking number of blows to the head. Maybe cut him some slack.

“Clueless” might be a little harsh, Timmy. I’m inclined to be a little more diplomatic and say that Carla Esparza looked like a fighter who knew she was overmatched on the feet, and so was perhaps a little too impatient to get it to the floor.

That impatience was at the root of all her problems against Joanna Jedrzejczyk. Not only did it make Esparza’s takedown attempts more obvious and therefore easier to avoid, but the way she forced one after another in a desperate bid to get Jedrzejczyk down also quickly tired her out. After that, Jedrzejczyk was free to take her time and pick her shots.

So no, not a great performance for Esparza, but let’s not write her off just yet. Just because she suffered from some flaws in her approach, that doesn’t mean the rest of her career is doomed. If anything, maybe it just means that she needs to round out her game a little more. Maybe it also means that Jedrzejczyk is a lot better than we thought.

I’m no legal scholar (shocking, I know), but reading this made me suddenly very pessimistic about the chances of us actually seeing that Quinton Jackson vs. Fabio Maldonado fight at UFC 186. To sum that story up, Jackson may or may not have been without his rights to terminate the contract, but that termination probably wouldn’t nullify the matching clause that Bellator wrote into the deal – a matching clause that survives for 12 months following termination “for any reason.”

Will Jackson eventually wind up back in the UFC? Maybe. But that clause sure makes it sound like he won’t get away from Bellator in time to meet Maldonado in Montreal next month. If the UFC doesn’t already have a back-up fighter on deck for just such a possibility, might be time to look into that.

If there are top welterweights coming off losses, it stands to reason there must also be top welterweights coming off wins. With Robbie Lawler set to defend his UFC belt against Rory MacDonald at UFC 189, everyone from Tyron Woodley to Johny Hendricks to Jake Ellenberger to the winner of the Carlos Condit vs. Thiago Alves bout, whoever that might be, is a possibility.

There’s also the possibility that any of those dudes will get booked against each other, only to later withdraw with an injury, creating an opportunity for one of the other dudes. Happens all the time in this zany sport of ours.

The bigger challenge for Demian Maia and Ryan LaFlare this weekend is to do something worth noticing and worth remembering, which is harder than it sounds in the current UFC climate. We’re coming off a pretty stacked pay-per-view that monopolized a lot of our attention. The UFC hasn’t exactly pulled out all the stops to promote Saturday’s UFC Fight Night 62 event, which makes you wonder how many fans even realize it’s happening.

For Maia, a win in his home country over an undefeated up-and-comer from the U.S. would be just the kind of late career boost that might propel him toward one last good run at the title. For LaFlare, Maia would be by far the most significant pelt of his wall.

But this is one of those fights where it’s probably not enough for either guy to just win. A boring decision in the main event will be forgotten before the sweat’s even dry on the mat, and it won’t translate well into a highlight for all those people who opted to skip a Fight Night event that’s mostly devoid of name-brand firepower.

Because, let’s be honest, there’s going to be a lot of those people this time around. The prelims here offer very little worth staying home for, and the main card doesn’t even start until 10 p.m. E.T. Some fans will quite reasonably opt to DVR this one rather than wait up past midnight, slogging through an eyeball-melting avalanche of repetitive ads, all just to see Maia and LaFlare.

And if those same fans wake up the following morning and see a headline that reads, “LaFlare decisions Maia in lackluster outing,” who could blame them for not racing to find it there in the DVR heap, languishing among old episodes of “The Daily Show” and “House Hunters: International”? If a tree falls in the forest on FOX Sports 1 and no one bothers to hit play after it happens, does it really make a sound?

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