Ben Fowlkes takes the contrarian stance:

This is about more than Jones trying to keep his fighting career alive (though it is certainly also about that). This is about the raison d'être for MMA. This is a sport that sprung out of the desire to see a fighter from one traditional discipline face a fighter from a different traditional discipline. Kickboxers against sumo wrestlers, karate black belts against Greco-Roman wrestlers, jiu-jitsu practitioners against boxers -- this kind of combat curiosity is the primordial ooze from which modern MMA crawled.

Now a boxer wants to try his hand at it and we tell him he has the wrong resume? He didn't come through the right channels, so he can't even try? That doesn't sound like the MMA I used to know.

I think he's fundamentally on to something here.