Is it harder to like Conor McGregor in this post-bus incident reality? Will his fortunes change significantly if he can’t beat Khabib Nurmagomedov at UFC 229? And on a scale of one to WTF?!, how excited are we for the UFC 230 main event?

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

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There are definitely going to be people who tell you that you’re being too sensitive (pro tip: if they have a Twitter handle with Conor McGregor’s name or likeness as a central focal point, mute them and move on), but screw it. I say that if you buy your ticket and take the ride with all the other fans, you get to decide how sensitive you feel like being about fighters’ personal behavior.

And I know what you mean about McGregor. For a while his whole “damn the rules” routine was fun and refreshing, especially when it was him pushing back on UFC management and striking a blow for the individual fighter.

Then he jumped in the Bellator cage and accosted officials there just because he felt like celebrating with his friend and it felt like, OK, some rules are there for a reason. Then came the hand truck incident and it started to seem like maybe he wasn’t a disruptive force for chaotic upheaval after all, but instead just a selfish jerk.

Everybody makes mistakes (maybe not these exact mistakes), but you’re right that it’s the response that leaves something to be desired. That bus incident in Brooklyn messed with other fighters’ lives and livelihoods. These were fighters who had done nothing to him. They just happened to be in the path of Hurricane Conor. Tough luck, kid.

Then again, look across to the other corner of the cage. There’s Khabib Nurmagomedov, who used to seem like a charming emissary from a distant land. Then we learned that he likes to demean homeless people for fun but feels that attending a rap concert is unacceptable behavior.

Point is, the nature of pro fighting sometimes makes us look for a hero even when there’s none to be found. Instead there are just people, messy and complex, out here being whoever it is in them to be, even when we wish for a slightly better version.

The one place McGregor will most assuredly not go, regardless of how the main event of UFC 229 turns out, is the back of the line. Even if he gets absolutely trucked by Nurmagomedov, he’ll still be the biggest star in the company, and as such the UFC will give him pretty much anything he asks for next.

Plus, who would turn down a fight with McGregor, even coming off a loss? It would be like telling the dump truck full of money that it can’t park in your driveway because it’ll block you from getting to your minimum wage job. Everybody wants a monster McGregor fight payout.

Don’t forget, the best-selling UFC pay-per-view of all time? It’s his rematch with Nate Diaz, the one that came right after he got slapped around and submitted. Conventional wisdom might tell us that a loss will hurt a fighter’s drawing power, but in McGregor’s case at least, recent history suggests otherwise.

Well it’s not a great sign for a fighter when the UFC’s most famous on-air commentator has no clue who you are. Ideally, someone fighting for a title in the main event of a pay-per-view would at least spark some mild sense of recognition in the people who are paid to know what goes on in the UFC. And yet here we are.

It’s not Sijara Eubanks’ fault. She’s doing her best, trying to make the most of an opportunity, and you can’t blame her for that. It’s also not Valentina Shevchenko’s fault. The UFC seems to have decided that she needs to end up with the women’s flyweight title, and she’s just trying to win whatever fight will get her there.

It is baffling from a sales and marketing perspective, though. Nobody was asking for this fight. Nobody, beyond the participants, is at all invested in it. And that’s what you’re going to go with as the headliner in Madison Square Garden?

I’m not saying the UFC is completely giving up on selling this event to us. I am wondering, however, what would giving up look like, and how would it be different from this?

The UFC has been trying to convince us that Nate Diaz is not a star for a few years now. Remember the whole “not a needle-mover” thing? Yep, that was in response to him. Then he ended up being one half of two of the biggest pay-per-views in UFC history.

Diaz, like his brother, has a stubborn fan appeal that is not significantly harmed by either defeat or absence. Like the moon, it just keeps existing. But even when Diaz and his UFC 230 opponent Dustin Poirier try to do some guerrilla marketing for their upcoming fight, no one at the UFC seems to want to work with them on it.

Maybe it’s a testament to just how badly the UFC wants to avoid putting one of the mercurial Diaz boys into a position where he can really call his own shots.

I see your point, but that only applies to situations where a fighter has to be pulled from a fight card that they’ve already been booked and announced for. Even then, the fighter can explain it himself if he wants to, as Sean O’Malley did recently, or he can let the process play out before going public.

I still think it’s a good change, because we’ve seen so many instances where it all gets blamed on a tainted supplement in the end, but not until after the fighter in question has been stained by the accusation. Then it’s like printing a retraction on page 12 for a story that was all over the front page.

This way, maybe they’ll figure out what they’re announcing before they announce it, which is an idea I can get behind.

Weight-cutting. Not only is it the only one that is actually, physically dangerous to anybody, I think it’s also unnecessarily harming the sport in ways we don’t always realize.

Fighters who aren’t starving and dehydrating themselves before the contest are fighters who will almost certainly put on better performances. They might also have longer, better careers. They’ll definitely be healthier for it, and when everyone is cutting weight it’s not like anyone’s really getting an advantage from it. They’re killing themselves just to keep from falling behind, which is crazy.

We could lose that and be better for it. After that, then we can talk about the seven-hour Fight Night events and meaningless interim titles.

Dana White had the advantage of jumping in with a brand name that was synonymous with the sport itself. That’s not to say that the UFC’s owners didn’t do a good job of building that brand once they had it. But he’s never had to do what Scott Coker has done both at Strikeforce and now at Bellator, carving out a space in a niche sport that’s dominated by a much larger competitor.

White would probably argue that that domination is no accident, just like he’d argue that the only reason MMA is even a thing today is because of the work the UFC and its owners did to get it there. Those claims aren’t entirely untrue, but they don’t tell the whole story either.

Coker has done a solid job of hanging on and building something out of nothing. At times he’s taken fighters who the UFC declared over and done with and turned them into genuine attractions. What’s more, he did it all with the UFC’s boot stomping on his fingers. If he was so bad at this, White and co. probably wouldn’t have had to buy his last company just to get rid of it.

I’ve been beating this drum for a while now. Tournaments make sense for combat sports, and have been used in virtually all of them. Of course, before we point to PFL and Bellator as examples to emulate, maybe we should wait and see how they both look by the end.

I guess I just can’t help but wonder how much MMA fighters bother to learn about the history and culture of the ancient Spartans before identifying with them through stuff like tattoos and nicknames. Because some of the things the Spartans got up to are not things that I suspect many fighters would like to be associated with now. Maybe those are the perils of seeing one cool movie on a subject and not researching it further before you get it etched on your body.

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