Twitter Mailbag: Wait, did UFC 205 just become the biggest MMA event ever?

Remember when we wondered whether UFC 205 was in trouble? Yeah, well, how about now? And what’s this about Jose Aldo preparing to walk away and battle the UFC in court? And can we really call the UFC 205 main event a true superfight?

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

One of the truly genius aspects of the UFC 205 lineup is the built-in backup plans. Somebody gets injured in the lightweight main event between Eddie Alvarez (28-4 MMA, 3-1 UFC) and Conor McGregor (20-3 MMA, 8-1 UFC)? Call up Khabib Nurmagomedov (23-0 MMA, 7-0 UFC) from the undercard to take his place.

What about that welterweight title fight in the co-main event? Frankly, either guy could get pulled from that one and we’d still have Donald Cerrone (31-7 MMA, 18-4 UFC) to step up with a Stone Cold-esque “Oh hell yeah” to fill in for him.

Oh, what’s that you say? There’s a chance that someone in the middleweight contender bout might flunk a drug test between now and November? No worries. Tim Kennedy (18-5 MMA, 3-1 UFC) and Rashad Evans (19-5-1 MMA, 14-5-1 UFC) are already warming up as potential replacements.

As it stands right now, I think you’d have to call UFC 205 – at least on paper – the most stacked event in UFC history. The lineup is so great that it could even afford to lose a few people. But, you know, it’d also be nice if that didn’t happen.

That’s a valid point. Maybe we shouldn’t make fights between UFC champions until they’ve firmly established their dominance in their respective weight classes. Except, hold up, have you actually looked at the list of current UFC champions lately?

In the eight men’s divisions, only one current champ has multiple title defenses. That champ, of course, is Demetrious Johnson, who has defended his flyweight title eight (!!!) consecutive times. He could go up in weight and challenge UFC bantamweight champ Dominick Cruz (who has defended the current iteration of his title exactly once), but we already saw that fight back in 2011, so where’s the fun in that?

The other problem is that, if we wait until we have dominant champions in adjacent weight classes before we start thinking superfight, it might be a lot harder to convince those champs to take that risk. Remember Georges St-Pierre and Anderson Silva and the superfight that never was?

If you ask me (and you actually, literally did), we should take our champion-vs.-champion bouts when and how we can get them. Otherwise, we may not get them at all.

It’s tricky. Jose Aldo (26-2 MMA, 8-1 UFC) is right to be upset, but is he right to be so upset that it’s worth walking away from the UFC – or, more likely, initiating a lengthy court battle?

On one hand, he says he’s been lied to, and it seems like he has. The UFC has let McGregor call his own shots ever since he took the featherweight title from Aldo. At times that means going back on its promises to other fighters. It’s hard to blame Aldo for looking at the current situation and concluding that the UFC is not going to be able to make McGregor do anything he doesn’t want to do, whether it’s giving up the 145-pound strap or granting Aldo a rematch.

And if these decisions aren’t up to the UFC anymore, doesn’t that leave Aldo subject to the whims of his greatest rival? And isn’t that pretty much intolerable, if you’re Aldo?

Then again, Aldo has had just one fight since his very definitive knockout loss to McGregor. He won that fight, and with it the interim title, but it’s not like there are no other featherweights for him to fight while he waits for the UFC to figure the McGregor situation out. How about a little patience, Jose? What, you’d rather spend the rest of your prime watching your lawyers sift through documents at an hourly rate?

When Aldo’s camp says that the heart of the problem is his lack of faith in anything UFC executives tell him at this point, I can’t say he’s wrong to feel that way. But I also don’t think that getting mad and going to the court is the best way to address that, partially because it rarely seems to work out well for those who try it.

At the same time, it’s not me who has to decide whether or not it’s worth it to keep getting punched for a living, and with no clear sense of where it will take me.

Maybe, but that’s not entirely a bad thing. Seems to me that Tyron Woodley is going to need some time to get his foothold with fans. It could be the nature of his knockout win over Robbie Lawler, or just how he’s perceived overall, but it doesn’t feel like Woodley (16-3 MMA, 6-2 UFC) has been fully accepted as the top welterweight in the world just yet.

That could change, and quickly, but in the meantime it might be nice for him to not have to worry about shouldering the promotional load all by himself. This way, maybe people show up for McGregor and find themselves intrigued by T-Wood. It could happen. You know, theoretically.

Rumors abound, but so far that’s all they are. It would make a certain degree of sense, though. The UFC has a lot of employees, particularly in its international offices, who perform duties that WME-IMG could handle on its own. In any situation like this, you’d expect the new owners to look for redundancies to eliminate. My guess is the UFC has a few.

I’m not sure if you meant to misidentify the weight class that John Dodson (18-7 MMA, 7-2 UFC) and John Lineker (28-7 MMA, 9-2 UFC) are fighting in, or if that was just a Freudian typo, but either way it’s very telling.

We may still think of Dodson and Lineker as flyweights, but they’re bantamweights now, so get with with the program.

Then again, what does it mean when two former 125-pound knockout artists fight at 135 pounds? What, they’ll be better fed, more hydrated, possibly more explosive? None of that sounds bad, at least from the perspective of the people on the outside of the cage.

As for who I favor in this matchup, I’ve got to go with Dodson. Lineker is scary when you let him do what he wants to do – which, for the record, is back you up against the fence and then bang, bro – but Dodson has the overall game and the discipline to thwart that style. His footwork should allow him to dictate where this fight takes place, and if it’s out in the open space rather than in tight, brawling quarters, he should pick Lineker apart.

Either that, or fall prey to the worst-case scenarios of Phil Mackenzie’s flowchart.

That’s one way to read UFC President Dana White’s repeated attempts to belittle the fighting spirit of the greatest welterweight champion the company has ever had. Another way to look at it is as a schoolyard negotiating tactic.

GSP has said that the holdout is about contractual issues. He left the UFC at a time when fighters could represent their sponsors in the cage. These days, however, it’s wall-to-wall Reebok (at least for the fighters; the UFC still plasters its cage with multiple sponsor logos). He wants a new contract to reflect the hit to his paycheck that this would represent, and that seems reasonable, but the UFC isn’t known for altering existing contracts in someone else’s favor.

What I don’t understand is why White can’t just say this when the topic comes up. Tell us that St-Pierre wants a certain sum of money, the UFC wants another, and the two sides are at an impasse. It happens in other pro sports all the time. You don’t often hear NFL owners claiming that their quarterback is holding out because he doesn’t have the heart to play pro football anymore.

Making things personal doesn’t help negotiations, and a guy like GSP isn’t going to be tricked into fighting cheap just for the sake of his ego. Framing the situation this way, as a referendum on whether GSP “wants it,” is not only ineffective, but also transparent. It’s like walking up to someone and saying, “I bet you don’t have what it takes to reach in your pocket right now and hand me five bucks.”

Who does this work on? Probably not the man White himself once hailed as a consummate professional and astute businessman, not to mention one of the greatest fighters in MMA history. This is GSP we’re talking about here. What does he have to prove to any of us after all this time?

I don’t think it’s becoming an issue – it’s been one for some time. The difference is that recently fighters have gotten more aggressive about speaking up on their own behalf. I suspect that’s due to a combination of factors.

For one thing, there’s guys like McGregor, who went head-to-head with the UFC and doesn’t seem to have suffered for it. He may have a unique star quality that enables him to do it, but when other fighters see one of their own making demands and getting them met, maybe they’re reminded that promoters aren’t gods, and their word isn’t always law.

I also think that, with the sale to WME-IMG, the fighters sense some change in the air. Lorenzo Fertitta is gone. Joe Silva is going. They’re more likely to feel like they’re working for a big, faceless company, so telling them that they’re part of a family that will take care of them later if they go along now is a harder sell. Plus, they’ve seen how that works – or doesn’t.

Then there’s the movement toward free agency. More fighters are fighting out their contracts and testing those waters, which makes it more acceptable for others to follow.

The question is where it all leads. Will it ultimately result in some kind of collective action? Or is it just a temporary flare-up? That’s the part of the picture we can’t see. Not yet, anyway.

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