Did Darren Till take a bit of a tumble even in victory at UFC Fight Night 130? Will Michael Bisping actually manage to stay retired? Did anyone even notice that an exciting undefeated fighter is on deck for Friday’s UFC event in Utica, N.Y.?

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

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It’s never a great look to miss weight that badly in your hometown. And when you fight a guy like Stephen Thompson, sure, there’s always a chance that you’ll spend too much of the evening following him around at too safe a distance.

But even after that ho-hum headliner, Darren Till still got a ton of support in Liverpool. He also still managed to seem electric and charismatic on the mic. Clearly, there’s something to build on there. We just don’t know yet if it’s more personality or skill.

I don’t think the thing to do is match Till up against someone with the potential to give him a boring fight. Seems like that’s what we just did, and the result was not exactly shocking. And right now? There’s a bit of a logjam at the top of the welterweight division, with no title action at all. Let’s get that sorted out. In the meantime, let’s put Till in there with someone who’s as interesting as he is.

Now why’d you have to go and bum me out by forcing me to consider that very plausible scenario? Honestly, when I heard Michael Bisping’s stated reasons for retiring, it gave me hope that he’d really stick to it. It’s not just the vision problems, either (though that is pretty significant). It’s also the stuff he said about realizing that he’d accomplished what he set out to.

Think about it. Here was a guy who most fans relegated to the role of bridesmaid contender long ago. Then one day you look up and he’s the middleweight champ with the all-time UFC wins record. What more is he really going to accomplish at this point, at his age, and with his impaired eyesight?

He had to wade through a lot of punishment just to get here. There’s no sense in wading through more for what are sure to be sharply diminishing returns.

And yet, well, you know how it goes. A few years into the soft life of retirement, a lot of fighters change their minds about how many fights are still left in them. But for the love of the MMA gods, I really hope Bisping isn’t one of them.

A win means the grand experiment can go on, and without getting any more ridiculous than it already has. That’s pretty much it. But then, that’s still significant, since the UFC would clearly like to have CM Punk stick around and keep selling pay-per-views. That just gets harder and harder to do if he can’t win a fight even against the most hand-picked of opponents.

Eventually even the UFC will face a crisis of conscience, or maybe just a crisis of credibility. You can’t keep promoting a guy who never wins. Eventually it just gets ludicrous. Also (and this is probably more important to the UFC), eventually people stop paying for it.

But if Punk can get just one win? Hey, he’s redeemed himself. He’s in the club. That will be the narrative, anyway. For whatever that ends up being worth.

The UFC hasn’t been getting a ton out of network TV fight cards lately (maybe in part because it hasn’t put forth much effort), so leaving big FOX is not a huge loss in that sense. Moving to ESPN is a big deal, though, because if you’re any kind of sports fan in America you basically can’t avoid it.

Bars and restaurants set their TVs to ESPN and just leave them there all day. People get ready for work with SportsCenter on in the background. Some people, the main way they keep up on sports is by watching highlights on ESPN every night.

For the UFC to get the benefit of that platform, it’s huge. I still don’t think it’ll make MMA bigger than soccer, mostly because combat sports just aren’t for everyone, which is fine. But this kind of spotlight can do a lot more to keep the UFC in the consciousness of mainstream sports fans. Now it’s up to the UFC to deliver a product that’s fun and easy for those fans to follow.

I think Scott Coker is at least justified to refrain from jumping straight to that fight. You need time to build that one. You also need to make sure it’s on a big fight card that you can really capitalize on, and not just another tape-delayed Friday night from some Indian casino.

Plus, after you throw Gegard Mousasi and Rory MacDonald in a cage together, then what? They’re two of Bellator’s biggest names outside the “heavyweight” division. They’re also some of the best pure talent Bellator has, and they can each bring some eyeballs to their respective divisions.

Eventually, I think Bellator is going to want to make that fight. I just think there’s some wisdom in waiting until fans are really demanding it.

Sure, I’m fine with that. I’d also be fine with a victory for Thompson. I also can’t get too mad about a victory for Till. It was that kind of fight.

The only thing I really can’t support after that is complaints from either side. If you fight that kind of style, you have to be prepared for the possibility that the judges won’t appreciate some of the finer details of your offense. That’s the risk you run. Even if you win, it’s not the kind of thing you want to make a habit of.

I hear this a lot, and I relate to it on some level. But the thing is, there are actually lots of exciting new fighters out there. And honestly, the average skill level of the new fighters is much higher than it was a decade ago. The problem is that it’s so much harder to stand out now, and for a couple reasons.

One is the sheer volume of MMA. Even if you only follow the UFC, it still feels like there’s a fight card almost every weekend. You might see someone worth getting excited about one night, but the information gets shoved out of your brain by the next event and the next one. Trying to focus on any one fighter is like trying to pick one zebra out of the herd.

Then there’s the UFC’s drift toward a more homogenous product. With the Reebok deal, everyone wears more or less the same thing. Everyone looks more or less the same. It’s just content, content, content, with more coming all the time. A fighter has to be really distinctive (and not always in a good way) to get noticed and remembered.

One example I always come back to is Gregor Gillespie, who fights at UFC Fight Night 131 this Friday night. But how many fans knew that? Here he is, undefeated, finishes in his last three fights, and he’s even got this “best fisherman in MMA” thing that I hesitate to call a gimmick because he is so clearly living it.

Why can’t the UFC get people hyped about a guy like that? Why does it feel like he fights, wins, then disappears, without anyone giving him a second thought until he’s in the cage again?

Answer: Because even the UFC can barely keep up with all this stuff. And with a reported 42 events planned for 2019, that is probably not going to get any easier.

Do I have to be the one to say that it’s Tito Ortiz? Because it’s definitely Tito Ortiz.

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