Is the MMA world being unfairly unkind to the latest UFC heavyweight title challenger? Are people wrong to insist that the sport’s biggest superstar shut up and fight? Who are the best (and worst) fighters to interview?

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

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On the topic of Francis Ngannou, I’ve got to say I’m a little disappointed with the way the MMA world did that thing it always does in these situations. You know what I mean. Before the fight, everybody’s excited about the new challenger. He’s great, they say. An MMA Mike Tyson. A truly extraordinary athlete. This could be the beginning of a whole new era.

Then he loses. Man, does this guy ever suck. Did he even train? LOL. What a joke.

I should probably be used to it by now, simply because this is such a clearly established pattern in MMA, but it still sucks.

The fact is, Ngannou is only about four years into his MMA career. That’s less time than Stipe Miocic has been fighting just in the UFC. He made a number of tactical errors, and he had a lot of his weaknesses exposed, but does that mean we have to go from crowning him as a king to clowning him as a chump just because of one fight?

Ngannou is still young, especially for the heavyweight division. He needs to develop and grow, but who says he can’t?

You go back and watch his early fights, you see a guy who had no idea what he was doing. A few years later, he’s knocking out top heavyweights. Imagine where he could be in a couple more years, with the right mindset and training. Maybe this is one time where it wouldn’t kill us to get off this boom-or-bust carousel and just let him be whatever he’s going to be in the end.

Yes. I mean, no. Not exactly. I mean, some of us are dumb (obviously not you or me…), but it’s not as if there are only two camps to choose between here.

First of all, you’re right that Conor McGregor changed the game, money-wise. Then again, he really only changed it for Conor McGregor. With the possible exception of friend and sparring partner Artem Lobov, how many fighters have seen a financial boost as a result of McGregor’s sudden wealth?

It’s not like the UFC is taking the money it made from McGregor’s boxing match and using it to boost fighter pay. And the increased attention that McGregor brings to the sport of MMA and the UFC itself doesn’t help so much when he goes more than a year without competing in either.

You could argue that McGregor is out there leading by example, showing fighters how to achieve and then wield negotiating leverage with the UFC. I’d agree with that to a point.

Previous stars like Chuck Liddell and Ronda Rousey were sometimes too willing to accept the UFC’s interpretation of what they were worth – the old, “you take care of us and we’ll take care of you” model – and so in that sense McGregor is different. He thought bigger than they did, and so he achieved more. Of course, you could also argue that his example has made the UFC more reluctant to let any one star get bigger than the brand.

I don’t think McGregor is wrong to plant his feet now and demand more – whether it’s more money, more power, more of a reason to step back in the cage bringing millions of paying customers with him. He has a unique value to the UFC right now, and he’s smart to insist on being compensated appropriately.

That said, people want to see him fight. That part just comes with being a famous fighter. And with so many interesting potential opponents in his division right now, it feels like a waste if he doesn’t fight.

Still, that’s his right. He gets to waste this time and this opportunity if he wants to. It’s the UFC’s responsibility to make a decision about how to respond to that.

So far, it seems like the UFC has decided to try to have it both ways. McGregor’s not stripped of his title, but two other guys are fighting for the “real” title anyway. Just logically, that doesn’t work. It’s the worst kind of compromise, the kind that solves nothing.

And so here we are, waiting for McGregor’s next move, which seems to be the way he wants it. I don’t fault him for that. I also don’t blame the people who are tired of waiting.

Think of it like kings (and khaleesis) in “Game of Thrones.” Once you start to have an argument about which one is the real one – McGregor, Tony Ferguson, Khabib Nurmagomedov? – you already have a problem on your hands. And, not unlike George R. R. Martin, the UFC seems content to take its time sorting through this dilemma it has created.

Looks like autocorrect thwarted your attempt to type Michael Bisping (either that or you’re actually trying to ask me about “Street Fighter II” character M. Bison, who you’re close enough with that you get to call him by his real first name, which would be rad). But as far as I’m concerned, the question isn’t just whether or not he should agree to fight Vitor Belfort – but whether he should fight at all.

On his podcast this week, Bisping admitted that his family and friends want him to stop. He seemed to acknowledge that they’d made some good points to that effect. His vision is compromised by that eye injury, and his body already has plenty of miles on it. Plus he already won the title and got his big payday against Georges St-Pierre, so why sign up for one last head trauma?

Then again, as Bisping pointed out, he’s got ongoing legal issues to pay for, and his recent Instagram post makes it seem an awful lot like he’s managed to talk himself into one more fight.

Bisping’s stated reason for resisting a fight with Belfort was that he didn’t want to end on what would surely be an emotionally charged fight, because then he’d end up talking a bunch of smack and, who knows, maybe even acting like a jerk, and then fans might remember him by this final impression.

On the flip side, one reason he’d want one more fight was so those same fans didn’t remember him as the guy who got choked out by GSP and then knocked out by Kelvin Gastelum a few weeks later.

To this I say, stop it. That is not how the collective fan memory works in this sport. We may not be capable of much, but we are capable of remembering more than just the last thing that happened in a fighter’s career.

Which is not to say that we won’t remember the last thing. Chris Lytle going out on that win over Dan Hardy was cool. Randy Couture getting his tooth kicked out of his mouth by Lyoto Machida was too, just not in the same way.

But what you’re not going to do – one way or another – is change our whole entire concept of you with just one last fight. Bisping could be a total gentleman to his final opponent, but it doesn’t mean we’ll remember him that way. He could also go out there and get steamrolled, and it won’t make us forget the other stuff he accomplished.

If Bisping wants that last paycheck, that’s understandable. Even if he just wants one more chance to walk through the curtain and hear his name boom through an arena, fine. But don’t do it because you think this one last fight will significantly change a career it took you nearly a decade and a half to build.

Daniel Cormier was one of my favorites. I did a story on him a few years back, and I was surprised how open he was, even on very difficult topics. He had that quality that you love in interview subjects, which is that he seemed to be genuinely considering every question I put to him rather than reaching for the easiest rote answer. He was willing to work through it, to be vulnerable when necessary, all to come up with something honest in the end.

As for the biggest train wreck, there’s stiff competition on that one. A lot of fighters just don’t say much, or refuse to speak in anything but cliches, which is tough.

Robbie Lawler used to make interviews intentionally difficult, but he’s gotten better over the years. Quinton Jackson gets the award for the person who sounded the least interested with the sound of his own voice. Brock Lesnar would always do that thing where no matter what you asked him, he acted like it was the dumbest question he’d ever heard.

Then there’s Nick Diaz, who used to do the whole interview, and then immediately insist he wasn’t happy with his answers and wanted to do it again, only to give almost identical answers the second time through.

But I’ll take any of those over basically any phone interview that includes an interpreter. Those are the absolute worst.

Seems to me that, in the unlikely event of a Dana White departure, the saddest thing would be trying to replace him with another bombastic promoter. You don’t want to go from Dana to Dana Lite, so you’d have to look for a completely different kind of personality.

You could go with someone more conservative and traditionally professional (which would be almost anybody). You could go with someone who has the street cred of a being an ex-fighter (though it would have to be one of the ones who hasn’t fallen out with the UFC toward the end). You could also choose someone universally respected by peers and fans (have you noticed yet that Brian Stann checks all these boxes?).

In the end, you’d have to make sure that you’re choosing someone based not on what the UFC needed in the past, but what it needs in the future, which may or may not be the same thing.

Does the UFC still need a semi-controversial carnival barker to get out there and be the media lightning rod who can consistently draw attention to the product? Or does it need someone who will play it more like a regular old sports league commissioner, even if that’s somewhat boring?

I’m honestly not sure, though I don’t expect we’ll have to answer the question any time soon.

Giving Chael Sonnen partial credit for “nearly” becoming the UFC light heavyweight champion when Jon Jones injured his own toe in the process of beating him senseless is pretty generous, but I see your point.

For a career that’s garnered so much attention, it’s strange that he never won a major title. Even his win in a fight that should have given him the WEC middleweight title technically didn’t, due to the early stages of Paulo Filho’s total lifestyle collapse.

Now Sonnen has a chance to win the Bellator “heavyweight” grand prix, which would be weird to think of as anybody’s highest achievement in this sport, but would actually be pretty impressive for Sonnen, as one of the smallest and oldest guys in the tournament.

But I still think that when his career is all over, it won’t be the wins and losses we remember most. It’ll be the other stuff – what Cormier might call the “extracurriculars” – both good and bad. We’ll remember how he showed other fighters the power of personality, inspiring a bunch of poor imitations that continue to this day. We’ll also remember him as one of the most notorious and unapologetic doping cheats to ever step in the cage.

It’s all part of the story at this point. Though I can’t say I wouldn’t be interested in a final chapter that somehow includes Fedor Emelianenko.

That’s one way to look at it. It’s also kind of like saying that your spouse has held you back from dating other people, one of whom might have turned out to be awesome. If the relationship you got out of the deal was worth foregoing the hypothetical benefits you may or may not have gotten without it, it’s probably hard to feel like that was a bad trade.

Think of it this way: Without Cain Velasquez to beat him up in the gym, maybe Cormier doesn’t become the fighter he is today. And maybe a run at heavyweight, with or without Velasquez in the picture, just reveals to him the limitations of his body type in that division. Or maybe he does become champ, but he just has one fewer good friend in the world.

We’ll never know for sure, but it doesn’t seem like it’s keeping him up at night.

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