Twitter Mailbag: What are we doing here, 'Cyborg' Justino?

In this week’s Twitter Mailbag, what’s going on with “Cyborg” Justino? And which man in the UFC’s light heavyweight title picture needs a rematch more? Plus, what’s the “best” fight on tap for Bellator’s pay-per-view in NYC?

All that and more in this TMB. To ask a question of your own, tweet to @BenFowlkesMMA.

* * * *

Seems to me that Cristiane Justino is in danger of alienating a lot of fans with the way she’s going. It’s one thing to be a brash prima donna when you’re a swaggering superstar in multiple divisions like Conor McGregor, but it’s something else when you’re the sole feature of a single lackluster weight class like “Cyborg” is.

When someone as levelheaded and generally positive as Brian Stann calls you out for being difficult, you might want to take a hard look at yourself. Failed drug tests have already cost Justino some fans. Missing out on a chance to be the UFC’s first women’s featherweight champ didn’t help her image much either.

She gets some slack because people love watching her cut a wide, destructive swath through the division. But if you pick a bunch of petty social media fights and don’t end up in any actual MMA ones, due at least in part to your own stubbornness? You won’t get the same slack for long.

They both are. Or, well, maybe they aren’t lying, but they’re both wrong. They each need this rematch, though for different reasons.

Daniel Cormier needs it because he’ll never be considered the true UFC light heavyweight champ if he doesn’t beat Jon Jones. We all know that. If Jones retired tomorrow and Cormier defended his title 10 more times (and just imagine how hard the UFC would have to scrape at the bottom of the 205-pound barrel by the end of that), he’d still be regarded as a temporary belt-holder in Jones’ absence.

And Jones needs the rematch because he needs to prove that he’s still the guy he used to be, but without all the extracurricular problems this time. Another win over Cormier would close a chapter in his career. It would silence anyone who said he’d frittered away his talent on suspensions and self-imposed hiatuses. It would forever cement him as the greatest light heavyweight ever, if not the greatest MMA fighter of all time.

Without that rematch, though, both guys are left with a gap in their careers and a question that never got answered. They don’t have to like each other, but they should admit that they need each other.

Mostly agree, but it doesn’t have to be that way if the UFC would only realize what they have here. Al Iaquinta is a hotheaded bro from Long Island whose nickname is “Ragin’ Al.” He knocks people out and then trashes hotel rooms when the UFC doesn’t hit him with a bonus.

He is like a living “Jersey Shore” episode, complete with the unbuttoned collared shirt at the end of the night. You’re telling me that guy’s not marketable?

One of my persistent complaints with the way the UFC promotes its fighters is that it fails to recognize that there’s more than one path to the waterfall. Not everybody has to be a scary pound-for-pound killer. MMA has all kinds of fighters, and instead of trying to squeeze them all into the same mold, seems like you’d be better off figuring out who they already are and then work with that.

Iaquinta is the dudebro with anger issues who can’t stop yelling at his boss. People will pay to see a guy like that, for one reason or another. It’s way better than a roster full of forgettable company guys who just want to fight whoever the UFC puts in front of them.

“Best” becomes a difficult term with these Bellator “tentpole” events. Everything about the way those are structured seems to suggest that it’s not athletic excellence that Bellator is selling, but rather a sort of familiar, creative weirdness.

Is Chael Sonnen vs. Wanderlei Silva going to be an inspiring demonstration of martial arts brilliance, assuming it even happens? Probably not, no. It’s probably going to look a lot like what we saw when they brawled on “TUF” a few years ago, only slower this time due to the inevitable gravity of time.

So what’s likely to be the best fight? I’d say Douglas Lima vs. Lorenz Larkin. But if that were all alone at the top of this pay-per-view card, no way it sells more than a handful of buys, and we both know it. Fedor Emelianenko is the milkshake that’s going to bring the boys to the yard here. Or, you know, not.

My job title was editorial manager, which basically meant that I wrote and edited all the content that ended up on the IFL’s website. After the IFL’s weekly TV show debuted to a terrible response from fans and found itself in need of an actual MMA fan to help fix it, I also helped out on that for a while. I also served as the guy in the New York offices who knew about and cared about MMA, since there weren’t a whole lot of organic fight fans among the employees there.

As for when I began to suspect that the IFL might not become a beloved combat sports institution, let’s just say I got hired in the fall of 2006 and by the following spring I was teaching online college writing courses in my spare time, just in case.

For all its faults, the IFL did get some stuff right. It gave fighters year-round health insurance, for instance, years before the UFC did it. It also gave fighters a stipend to live and train on, so they weren’t struggling with side jobs at the expense of their development as athletes.

Of course, it also blew through way too much cash, way too quickly, but the real problem was that the team/league concept never took hold with fans. Makes you wonder how the newly rebranded Professional Fighters League will do with a similar approach.

That was a scary knockout. Seeing Jake Ellenberger down on the mat for so long after (or, more accurately, hearing that he was down on the mat, since the cameras tend to avoid that at UFC events) was a sobering reminder of the violent nature of this sport. You can get seriously hurt in that cage. For a lot of reasons, I think it’s important for us not to look away in those moments. If we’re going to enjoy the violence when it comes in a more palatable form, we owe it to the fighters to recognize the risks when it gets ugly.

After watching an advanced screening of the first episode, I recorded the second on DVR and ended up skipping through a lot of it. It’s still the same show, man. And I have seen that show many, many times.

While I’m interested in these particular fighters and in the comeback narrative, I’m totally uninterested in the bickering between coaches and the usual reality-show filler. The competition is what matters, especially on this season. That’s all I’m sticking around for, and I don’t need to sit through the whole thing for that.

That scenario is unlikely for at least two reasons, but if it happened I’d mostly feel happy for the flyweight division as a whole. One big draw there could change people’s notions of the entire weight class, the same way McGregor showed that featherweights can be big money when done right.

So what’s stopping it from going down that way? For one, I’m still skeptical that Cody Garbrandt really wants to cut to 125 pounds. He’s not a small bantamweight, and killing himself to drop another 10 pounds just so he can fight a much faster opponent in Demetrious Johnson might not sound like such a good idea when he’s faced with the chance to actually do it.

But even if he did, and even if Garbrandt won, you really think he wants to camp out there and make his home at flyweight? He’d probably be one and done, either in victory or defeat, then head back up to bantamweight where the weight cut is more comfortable. That wouldn’t create a new star at flyweight. It’d just create chaos in one more UFC division.

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