Twitter Mailbag: Jose Aldo's legacy, UFC fighter retreat aftermath, and more

Prior to Jose Aldo’s title-unifying attempt at UFC 212 on Saturday night, what’s the state of the UFC featherweight champ’s overall legacy? And what did the “retreat” tell us about the relationship between UFC ownership and UFC fighters? Plus, should “Mighty Mouse” be jumping at the chance to fight a former a champ from a higher division?

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

* * * *

Nobody’s legacy is set in stone as long as he’s still above ground and active (just ask Anderson Silva about his Thai sex juice). But regardless of what happens from here on, Jose Aldo has earned the right to be thought of as one of the greatest featherweights of all time. One 13-second loss to Conor McGregor doesn’t change that, the same way a knockout loss to Matt Serra didn’t turn Georges St-Pierre into an overnight nobody.

The difference is that Aldo will probably never get the chance to avenge that loss. But if the only blemish on his record is a defeat at the hands of someone who soon became too big – literally and figuratively – to defend the featherweight title, that doesn’t erase everything he’s done.

Aldo could add to it at UFC 212. A title-unifying win over interim champ Max Holloway would cement his dominance over the division, even at a time when a younger generation is challenging for the throne. Then again, Aldo could stop now, and we’d all have to give him his due. For six straight years, he was the best there was.

They might have gotten the time, but I don’t know if I can recall a referee actually telling them that they had up to five minutes to recover.

That’s the important distinction written into the rules. You get kicked in the groin, and the five minutes is yours to do with as you please. You can use it all as you walk around and try not to vomit. You can hop up and down for 30 seconds and then declare yourself good to go. It’s your call.

With eye-pokes, the rules treat it more as a medical issue than a question of personal comfort and recovery. The ref and the doctor only want to know one thing: Can you see?

But as any parent who’s ever been poked in the eye by a toddler knows, that’s not such a simple question. Can you see after a child scrapes her tiny fingers across your retina? I mean, kind of. You have two eyes, after all. So what if one is drowning in a blurry, watery pain at the moment? Give it a couple minutes and it’ll probably be fine.

That’s why it arguably makes more sense to allow for five minutes in the event of an eye-poke than it does for a groin shot. The groin thing, we’re just waiting for you to feel better, and even then you’re probably not going to feel great. With the eye, we’re waiting for your vision to improve, and you’re going to need that vision to avoid the punches that will be flying your way the minute you tell the doctor that you can see.

And of course you’re going to say you can see. If you say you can’t, that’s an instant fight-ender, and everyone knows it.

A few of the officials I talked to stressed that the referee has ways of buying a fighter time to regain full vision. The ref can stand there talking. He can take a leisurely stroll over to warn the opponent. He can manipulate the system to the benefit of the fouled fighter.

But why leave that to a referee’s discretion? Why not put it in the rules, just like with groin shots? If it’s because we’re worried that fighters will milk it for extra rest time, then why don’t we have the same concern about low blows? Seems to me that either both should result in five-minute recovery periods, or neither should. You’re not going to convince me that the groin is more vital to a fighter’s safety than the eyes.

First of all, we’ve heard what it would take to get Demetrious Johnson to go up a weight class, and it involves some extra zeroes on his paycheck. Second, he’s one win away from breaking Anderson Silva’s record for most consecutive UFC title defenses, so what kind of sense would it make to put him in a non-title bout instead?

The UFC loves being able to slap a gold belt on the poster. It simplifies event marketing, and you wouldn’t get that if “Mighty Mouse” and T.J. Dillashaw met at bantamweight. It would also feel like a fight about nothing, all leading up to nothing, which probably wouldn’t aid Johnson’s drawing power much.

I don’t often find myself in agreement with UFC President Dana White, but I think he’s right that Johnson vs. Dillashaw for the flyweight title is the way to go. It’s not just for Johnson’s bottom line, but also for his legacy.

He’s been schooling flyweights one after another, and it seems like each time he does it fewer people care. Fighting a former bantamweight champion in a bid to break the title defense record? That’s history right there. That’s something people might pay to see. For Johnson, that in itself is rare enough already.

I see your point, but no. The official end date of that term and concept was Sept. 10, 2016. That’s the day Phil “CM Punk” Brooks, a professional wrestler with zero MMA bouts and only limited training, stepped in the octagon to fight on the pay-per-view portion of UFC 203. That was the moment UFC executives lost any ability to claim that there is a certain baseline of skill and ability that all potential fighters must meet.

Compared to that, the Gokhan Saki signing makes almost too much sense. We know he can fight. His wealth of experience in kickboxing bouts tells us that much. All that’s left to see is whether he can make a plausible showing in MMA, where, depending on the opponent, he’ll have to worry about takedowns and the ground game.

One thing we know for sure, though? Even if, like Mr. Punk, he gets taken down off his first attempted strike and then demolished on the mat, at least it’ll be a better looking punch.

I don’t want to be overzealous about pulling the plug on one of the few women’s divisions the UFC has, but it’s not looking good. This is a weight class that was essentially created for Cristiane Justino, who has yet to fight in it. The inaugural title bout pitted two bantamweights against each other, with the loser immediately returning to her former weight class and the champion now promising to abandon her title and do the same. So what are we left with?

It’s a mess, is what it is, and I don’t see how it’s going to get any better any time soon. If the champ would rather give up the belt than fight the most famous fighter in the division, and if there’s no one else even signed to the division at the moment, that’s bad news. You can’t build a weight class around just one fighter. Especially if so many others are scared to fight her.

Not an immediate rematch, no. After more Jon Jones and Daniel Cormier build-up, we’re going to run into some inevitable fan fatigue soon. In the event that Cormier evens the score at UFC 214, I say give him another contender next and let Jones remind us of his brilliance by spanking someone further down the line in order to earn a rubber match.

Of course, there’s always the chance that Jones could spin off into a self-destructive cyclone before we get a chance to see that third meeting. But something tells me that success is more dangerous to him than failure. Maybe a loss is all it takes to bring out the best version of him.

Nothing’s irreparable here, but it’s going to take more than a 50-percent-off coupon to the Reebok online store to make everybody friends again.

To be clear, the disconnect has very little to do with WME-IMG. These wheels were in motion well before the sale. The Reebok deal that robbed fighters of their sponsor money? That was the old Zuffa’s doing. The complete lack of financial transparency, which keeps fighters wondering just how small their piece of the overall pie really is? Also a total Zuffa move.

UFC executives have gotten used to a certain pattern: Fighters complain, media reacts, management offers vague assurances that everything will get worked out at a later date, and then the fervor dies down, and it’s back to business as usual.

You can see the same thing happening here. After the discontent bubbled to the surface at the fighter retreat, management listened to the complaints and the suggestions for improvement, but made no serious promises and took no concrete action. Until that changes – until the UFC actually makes some meaningful attempt to bridge the divide between fighters and management – the relationship sits in a state of disrepair.

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