Twitter Mailbag: What's the best and worst MMA has to offer?

What are the best fights to use as an introduction to MMA? Did last weekend’s Bellator event provide us with one of the worst? Who’s the most overvalued favorite and undervalued underdog on Saturday’s UFC on FOX 28 fight card?

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

It’s funny, I was just having a similar conversation with Jon Jones. Not the fighter. The one with a sense of humor. After years of getting MMA-related hate tweets aimed at someone else, he’s finally becoming an MMA fan. You can see him on Twitter, following along during events and asking for good fight recommendations to help him catch up and contextualize all this information. It’s actually really fun to see.

So which three fights would/have I recommended to him, or anyone trying to understand the appeal of this MMA stuff?

1. Matt Hughes vs. Frank Trigg II
This one still stands as the classic “welcome to MMA, isn’t it great?” fight for me. It’s the one I showed my dad many years ago, in an effort to convince him that boxing wasn’t the only combat sport worth following. It’s one I’d still show people now, because it has a little bit of everything that makes this sport fun, plus it only takes a few minutes.

2. Nick Diaz vs. Takanori Gomi
You’ve got to get some PRIDE FC action in the list, and you also better have you some Nick Diaz. This one fulfills both requirements, plus there’s a wild finish.

3. Dan Henderson vs. Mauricio Rua I
Probably the best fight I’ve ever seen in person. It was a wild ride for five full rounds, and there are several points where you think there’s no way this can possible keep going. And yet it does.

The first two don’t depress me too much. We know those guys. We know what their deals are. They’re just going to keep doing that as long as there’s someone willing to pay them to do it, so the fault lies with anyone who expects anything different at this point.

As for which fighter’s continued efforts bum me out the most, as this point I’ve got to say it’s Anderson Silva. Part of it is being forced to watch him turn from a Jedi knight into just another good-but-not-great fighter, thanks to the terrifying power of time. The other part, of course, is the drug test failures.

The response to Silva’s drug tests (and the response to his response) tells us a lot about how many fans feel about him right now. It’s not so much “say it ain’t so” or even “you broke my heart,” but more “we wish you’d just stop.” Stop fighting. Stop coming up with half-baked theories as to why you suddenly can’t turn in a clean urine sample in the age of improved testing. Just stop.

I think it’s because a lot of us felt like his legacy had been decided, and that legacy seemed pretty bulletproof. He was going to go down as one of the best to ever do it. Now all he seems to be doing is undermining that idea, and we really wish he’d knock it off.

At this point, I have very little interest in seeing Demetrious Johnson fight anyone he’s already beaten. I mean, I’ll still watch because he’s a brilliant talent and maybe the best all-around fighter in the history of the sport, but I can only get excited about sitting there and watching reruns.

“Mighty Mouse” vs. T.J. Dillashaw is the fight to make, at least if you want to get me truly, unashamedly pumped about seeing Johnson in the cage again. Anything else is going to be a letdown.

The column you’re referencing was written by my former coworker Brent Brookhouse for Bloody Elbow, and it offered a lot for us to think about. I will add that, if MMA is a Gen X fad, the UFC might want to rethink its scheduling practices, since an aging fan base is less and less likely to stay up past midnight waiting for you to wrap up the commercials and get on with the main event.

But I don’t think it’s indicative of a dying fad any more than the ups and downs in boxing or pro wrestling were signs of the same. I think this ebb and flow might just be the nature of combat sports, to some extent.

I’ve made this point before, but think about the way this differs from team sports. If you’re a Chicago Cubs fan, that’s likely rooted in years of geographical and personal/family history for you.

The players change from year to year, the team’s fortunes rise or fall, but the Cubs are always the Cubs. You’re still going to buy a hat here and there, probably catch a few games just to enjoy being at the ballpark. If the team is good, you’re swept up in the fever. If they’re bad, you complain about them to fellow fans. It’s a fixture in your life.

But fight sports hinge on individuals. The UFC has tried to promote its brand ahead of its fighters at times, but even at its best the brand alone isn’t enough to convince huge numbers of people to pay 60 bucks every month just to see whoever happens to be available come fight time. Stars drive this sport, the same as in boxing. Some people love it so much they’ll watch nearly anyone do it, but that’s the core, niche audience – not the masses.

The good news is, boxing has gone up and down, died and been resurrected many, many times over the last century. MMA will probably be the same. And even when I’m an old man sitting in a barbershop like that scene from “Coming to America,” I have every reason to believe that I’ll still be arguing about a hypothetical fight between Fedor Emelianenko and Randy Couture.

In my expert legal opinion … yeah, sorry, I don’t even have the beginnings of the necessary foundation to realistically answer this.

One thing I can say is that already the documents and depositions coming out of this thing have offered some interesting insight into the way the UFC does business. When the UFC’s own attorneys are blaming low fighter pay on the lack of a union? That’s significant. Also something fighters might want to consider the next time the UFC tells them that collective action would be bad for them.

Gone are the days when we could confidently assert that winning any one fight would automatically result in a guaranteed title fight. It’s even trickier at featherweight, where the champ is injured for the moment. We don’t know how the contender picture is going to shake out, or whether that contender will be/stay healthy enough to cash in that title shot in a timely fashion.

The winner of Saturday’s fight between Josh Emmett and Jeremy Stephens could get a fortuitous phone call out of the blue one day, or it could be another year before he’s even in the conversation. That makes it hard to talk with any certainty about the stakes in fights like this, which also makes it hard to properly promote them.

Overvalued favorite: Jessica Andrade.

She’s a very good fighter who does a lot of things really, really well, but she’s by no means unbeatable, and a high-energy fighter like Tecia Torres, whose output has a way of stealing rounds at times, could be trouble for her. I understand Andrade being the favorite, but 3-1 seems overblown.

Undervalued underdog: Sam Alvey

He’s fighting a dangerous opponent in Marcin Prachnio, but it’s Prachnio’s UFC debut and we all know that those don’t always go as expected. Alvey’s style can be frustrating to watch, but it also sometimes baits his opponents into doing something stupid and getting caught with a counter. At +230, I might consider it worth a shot.

No way. At least Heather Hardy and Ana Julaton were trying. They just lacked the ground skills to fight the kind of fight they found themselves in. I’ve seen way too many exhausted heavyweights staring at each other over the years to put that bout in my top five.

You want to see something truly awful, go back and watch Gabriel Gonzaga vs. Kevin Jordan at UFC 56. The ending is memorable because it’s swift and violent, making it the exact opposite of the 14 minutes leading up to it.

Matter of fact, that makes it very similar to Frank Mir vs. Mirko Filipovic, a fight that ended in a knockout at an event where no other knockouts happened, and still no knockout bonus was given. That tells you something.

We won’t know that for sure until it happens (or very obviously doesn’t), but this feels to me like a bit of a warning shot by the UFC. When the promotion first issued these fight week weight guidelines, the obvious question in response was what would happen if fighters ignored them. Would the UFC seriously scrap a fight because someone was too heavy several days before weigh-ins? This sends the signal that, at least in some cases, it will.

Does that mean pay-per-view headliners need to be as concerned? Probably not. But if motivates rank-and-file fighters to manage their weight better and stop relying on extreme last-minute cuts, it could still end up being a very good thing.

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