Another attempted weight cut resulted in another hospital visit when the UFC went to St. Louis. Has the problem actually gotten worse since early weigh-ins became the norm? Is there a more creative solution we haven’t considered yet? And should the UFC president be using inside information from the UFC Performance Institute trainers to criticize a fighter while he’s laid low?

MMAjunkie columnist Ben Fowlkes and retired UFC and WEC fighter Danny Downes discuss in this week’s Trading Shots.

Fowlkes: So I’m sitting there in front of the TV on Sunday night when UFC Fight Night 124 goes live on FS1, and I can’t help but notice that the broadcast kicks off with a brief list of the fights we won’t be seeing.

Some of that was due to freak incidents, like Zak Cummings’ bout with Thiago Alves being scrapped after Cummings slipped in the bathroom while cutting weight and split his head open. Then there was Uriah Hall vs. Vitor Belfort, which got cancelled after Hall was hospitalized during his weight cut in an incident fellow fighter Paige VanZant later described as the “scariest thing I have ever seen.”

According to my man Mike Bohn, 51 fighters have missed weight or failed to weigh in during the 18-month period since the UFC implemented early weigh-ins. In the 18 months prior, that number was only 17.

Are the early weigh-ins a problem, Danny? Should we go back to late afternoon weigh-ins, or some compromise between the two? Or is this still about how fighters are cutting weight, and not when?

Downes: Not sure if you had to take a statistics course when you were getting your fancy English degree, but I should probably remind you that correlation does not equal causation. Yes, that even applies to your “lucky” hockey underpants.

I will admit that it’s plausible that early weigh-ins have contributed to the uptick in failed weigh-ins. Fighters are creatures of habit. They all have their own specific way of cutting weight, but the majority usually follow the same trend.

You start the cut the night before by hitting the sauna/steam room. Depending on what your weight looks like after that, maybe you eat something very light and bland and go to sleep. When you get up the next morning, hopefully you floated a couple pounds and can continue the cut until you hit the number.

When I was fighting, the weigh-ins were usually around 4 p.m. Depending on what time you woke up, that gave you at least five hours or so until you had to be at the bus/van for transport. Those were crucial hours. Sometimes it took over an hour for that last half pound to drip off. To assume that fighters have not perfected the timing of these early weigh-ins yet is probably safe.

Having said that, blaming the hour of the weigh in ignores the systemic problem and tries to tie the current problem to an external issue. The when is a factor, but it’s not the root cause. The how of weight cutting is the real issue.

All these problems that come with depleting the body after weeks of intense training? Those have existed for years. Are they more common now, or are we just noticing it more? That’s a question I don’t know the answer to (although I’m sure you’ll try to give me one).

I know athletic commissions are trying to solve this problem, but is it something we can solve? I’m skeptical that more weight classes will help. Weighing fighters a month in advance and making them stick to it won’t help either. If you can’t eliminate weight-cutting altogether, and if weight-cutting is dangerous in and of itself, what are we supposed to do?

Fowlkes: You mention the “crucial hours” before stepping on the scales. So here’s a question: Why not provide fighters with more of those hours?

Instead of making everyone get on the scales in the morning, then making them mime the same activity for the TV cameras later in the day, why not just open the scales from, say, 9 a.m to 4 p.m., let the fighters weigh in when they want, then parade them on stage for photo op face-offs when it’s all over?

Will people still miss weight and end up in the hospital and leave us arguing over who should still be paid what and when and why? Probably. But it also seems like it might decrease some of the stress associated with the process, if only slightly, and maybe then it’s not such a mad rush to shed weight before noon, since you know you have all day to get it done.

You’re right, though. This is a deeper problem. I was initially heartened to hear that the UFC was going to be more proactive about education on this issue, particularly with help from the UFC Performance Institute in Las Vegas. Then I see UFC President Dana White using reports from Hall’s stay at that same institute to trash him while he’s laid low.

I realize that fighter-trainer confidentiality isn’t quite like attorney-client privilege, but still, that’s a little cold-blooded, isn’t it? Might even make some people think twice about going to the UFC’s gym if it’s going to be used against them later.

Thankfully, what you and I have here is a safe space, one where we both feel free to be as crazy as we wanna be. It is with that in mind that I wish to propose a truly radical and possibly terrible idea. Just bear with me a moment.

Say Hall and Belfort agree to fight. They’re both middleweights, competing in the middleweight division, and we think of them as such. But say they look at each other, feel comfortable with the match-up, and get to talking it over between themselves. They decide, you know, we could do a 190-pound catchweight. An extra five pounds, just for comfort’s sake, and they both agree to it weeks in advance, with the understanding that we’ll all still regard it as a middleweight fight.

Would that be so wrong, Danny? I mean, probably yes. But I look forward to the exact way in which you’ll flip out about it.

Downes: It’s still amazing to me how wrong you can be with such little text. I suppose I should be happy that you can still keep the magic of your flawed arguments in this writing relationship going after all these years.

First, let’s talk about your plan to extend the weigh-in hours. You talk about it like it’s some type of novel idea when all you’re really doing is saying, “Let’s just do it like we used to.” Again, I point out that the timing of the weigh-ins may seem like a big deal on its face, but it’s because fighters and camps haven’t adapted yet.

We have another MMA example of Campbell’s Law at work. Fighters knew how to manipulate the old system. They’ll learn how to manipulate the current system. It just hasn’t happened yet. By shifting the timing of weigh-ins, you’re treating a symptom and not the disease.

Second, I’ll agree that White trashing Hall that way is in bad taste. White valuing his fight card over somebody’s health and safety isn’t exactly a revelation, and I’m almost surprised he didn’t go on to tell us that he and Hall were never friends in the first place.

What you miss in White’s rant is the real criticism of Hall. If (and that’s a big if) White’s claims of Hall going out to the club and not taking his training seriously are true, that would hurt your sympathy argument.

Which leads me to asking how much sympathy we should give fighters who miss weight. We should never want fighters to get hurt or fall sick and lose out on a paycheck. At the same time, a lot of these weight-cutting problems are their own doing.

Finally, let’s address you wanting to create the “whatever you feel like” weight class. Perhaps this is the natural extension of the decreasing importance of weight classes and belts in general, but I’m not ready to go there yet. I don’t think you realize how radical of a change that would be. You’d be blowing up the entire way in which we’ve organized the sport for years. It would also unnecessarily complicate things for the fighters.

The current system is not working. Perhaps it is inherently flawed, and we will always have to deal with these type of problems. If that’s the case, then we’ll probably have this conversation more times in the future. I may not know how to fix it, but eliminating it entirely isn’t the answer.

Weight classes and titles may not mean what they used to, but they still matter. Hopefully the UFC and athletic commissions weigh their options better than you.

Ben Fowlkes is MMAjunkie and USA TODAY’s MMA columnist. Danny Downes, a retired UFC and WEC fighter, is an MMAjunkie contributor who has also written for UFC.com and UFC 360. Follow them on twitter at @benfowlkesMMA and @dannyboydownes.