Twitter Mailbag: On Ronda Rousey's return, and Greg Hardy's MMA dreams

In this week’s Twitter Mailbag, a former UFC women’s champ is returning, but did she choose the wrong opponent to jump back in against? And what are we supposed to think when an NFL player who was essentially run out of the league wants to take up MMA instead?

Plus, it’s only October, but it seems pretty clear who the fighter of the year is.

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

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Considering her other realistic options, I’m pretty sure Ronda Rousey and her camp think this is a tune-up fight. It just happens to be against the division’s current champ, and come on, we all knew Rousey wasn’t going to make her return in a non-title bout against Jessica Eye.

Skill-wise, Rousey (12-1 MMA, 6-1 UFC) should beat Amanda Nunes (13-4 MMA, 6-1 UFC). While we all got a reminder of Nunes’ punching power when she won the title at UFC 200, we can’t forget that she also has TKO losses to Cat Zingano and Alexis Davis – two women whom Rousey absolutely schooled.

Rousey should win this. But we also have to account for two difficult variables.

The first is preparation. Rousey’s longtime coach, Edmund Tarverdyan? Let’s just say nothing we’ve seen from recently should make us any more confident in his ability to help her close the holes in her game.

Nunes, meanwhile, is at American Top Team, where she has access to some great coaches who will spend every minute between now and Dec. 30 working on a plan to stay out of the clinch and make Rousey pay for seeking it out. Advantage: Nunes.

The other variable is rust. Rousey will have been out of action for a little more than a year by the time she steps in against Nunes at UFC 207. She spent part of that time trying to get her teeth back in apple-eating condition, and the rest of it doing Hollywood celebrity stuff. Nunes fought twice in that time and has been mostly in the gym ever since. Advantage: Nunes.

Is all that enough to negate Rousey’s physical ability, plus her skill at forcing opponents into her game and then demolishing them there? That’s the big question. But if Rousey’s not up to answering it against Nunes, she probably doesn’t want any part of the other women on her short list.

I don’t get the sense that Rousey wants to fight Cristiane Justino (17-1 MMA, 2-0 UFC). I don’t think UFC executives would want it either, unless they knew for certain that it was the last fight they were ever going to get out of Rousey.

As it stands, any fight we see Rousey in from here on out could very well prove to be the last one, but we might not know that until it’s over. And as long as there’s money to be made fighting your way through the carousel of recent champs at bantamweight – and there is – why go up a division to fight the terrifying monster lurking there?

The former NFL defensive lineman has yet to sign a bout agreement, and already it doesn’t seem like it’s going so great. NFL reporter and MMA enthusiast Jay Glazer wasted no time urging Greg Hardy to try a different sport, while also urging MMA trainers everywhere to keep him out of their gyms.

UFC President Dana White said he might be willing to forgive Hardy’s domestic violence past, but questioned whether he’s “good enough” to fight in the UFC. (Clearly, the former All-Pro is no CM Punk.)

While I totally understand why some people might want to stop Hardy’s MMA career before it starts, let’s be honest with ourselves about who else we let into this sport.

Despite White’s claim once upon a time that violence against women was “one thing that you never bounce back from,” there are several active UFC fighters with histories of domestic violence. One of them, Anthony Johnson, is challenging for the UFC light heavyweight title on the next pay-per-view card. And what does Glazer think of him? Well, here he is praising “Rumble” for being “about as violent as you can get.”

Seems to me we have to make up our minds. Either a history with domestic violence disqualifies you from MMA or it doesn’t. We don’t get to pick and choose.

As for how Hardy might actually do in the cage? Anybody who can handle himself on an NFL defensive line can probably show up and beat a lot of current heavyweights on power and athleticism alone. Let him get some real training under his belt, and Hardy might be a problem. Possibly in more ways than one.

Let’s see, so far in 2016 Michael Bisping has beaten Anderson Silva, Luke Rockhold and Dan Henderson. On paper (by which I mean, ignoring the age of opponent at least somewhat controversial nature of two of those wins), that’s an incredible year for anyone. It’s even more impressive for a 37-year-old fighter who many of us thought would never even sniff a UFC title.

You look at his face after that last fight, and you are also reminded that Bisping (30-7 MMA, 20-7 UFC) has paid in blood to get where he is after years of struggle. He doesn’t always make himself easy to like, but at this point you have to respect what he’s done with the opportunities he’s had.

If the UFC’s past estimates of its own financial impact on the city are correct, losing a guaranteed international draw like Conor McGregor (20-3 MMA, 8-1 UFC) indefinitely could ultimately mean a difference of hundreds of millions of dollars for Las Vegas.

But ideally, the Nevada State Athletic Commission would not take that into account when deciding how to punish a fighter. Also ideally, it wouldn’t take into account how much money it thinks it needs in order to accomplish certain goals before deciding how much to take from a fighter it’s decided to discipline.

We want athletic commissions to be focused on things like fighter health and safety, a level playing field, and a fair application of the rules across the board. Just like we raise our eyebrows when the NSAC gives Floyd Mayweather special treatment (and it does), we’d do the same if it gave McGregor a pass just to keep the money flowing in.

Still, would it kill them to be a little more reasonable about this stuff? Or to at least go about it in a way that feels less like them jacking a fighter up solely because they can? If you can’t do that, maybe you don’t deserve to be the fight capital much longer.

It’s incredibly good, and that extends beyond just the top five (of which Robert Whittaker isn’t even a member, and that in itself reminds you how good the division is). Seriously, go look at the USA TODAY Sport/MMAjunkie MMA middleweight rankings and just scan the top seven. Tell me who on that list doesn’t have a shot at becoming champ some time in the next year? That makes for a lot of potentially awesome fights.

I guess my only question to you is, when you ask why it isn’t “seen as more talented,” who are these dummies you’re talking to who can’t recognize talent when they see it?

I see that Al Iaquinta himself offered his own answers to your questions, and who would know better than him on the retirement question? (Answer: Nobody, but no fighter is ever safely retired until he’s so old he can’t climb the steps into the cage anymore.)

As for the last question, how the revenue is split up is the essential question on fighter pay. If we don’t know how the money is split up, how can we say whether it’s being divided fairly? And since it’s the UFC that won’t tell us what the split is, we can reasonably assume that it’s not because company executives fear we might think they’re being too equitable.

My thoughts? If that’s really what happened and why – and it seems increasingly likely – it’s despicable. There might be room for some disagreement on the topic of child MMA. But if your response to legitimate criticism is to assault the child of the person who criticized you, that tells us everything we need to know about you. What we still don’t have an answer to is why people in the MMA community would want to be associated with that.

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