Bloody Elbow June 2008 Meta-Rankings: Welterweight

Here’s the 170lb edition of the June Meta-Rankings.

The explanation of the Meta-rankings concept and methodology is in the full entry. Just keep in mind that they’re not our opinion of who the best fighters are, rather they are an attempt to track how well fighters are regarded across the web.

No real surprises emerge from this month’s scores. GSP is almost universally regarded as the #1 welterweight. Only one of the 21 sites surveyed ranked him anywhere else. Fitch is equally clearly the consensus #2. This makes the upcoming GSP/Jon Fitch UFC title bout one of those rarest of all title matches — the consensus champ vs the consensus #1 contender.

Thiago Alves’ quick rise hasn’t been fully digested by the MMA world. Some sites haven’t updated since he beat Hughes. Others are punishing Alves for missing weight. I expect Thiago will have to beat Koscheck or Diego Sanchez to get a title shot.

The July 26th Jake Shields/Nick Thompson fight is clearly the best matchup possible for a non-UFC promotion. Well done EliteXC. If they sign IFL champ Jay Hieron to go with Hector Lombard, and build both guys up correctly, they could have a decent division of legit challengers to keep Shields busy for the forseeable future.

There are some clear outliers muddying up the charts. Goulet and Kitaoka are both on the list due to one site — the same site that ranked GSP at #10. I’m looking for ways to discount patently dumb rankings. Perhaps a minimum score of 5 points to make the list? Please chime in with your ideas in the comments. I’m not looking to eliminate any sources as bad decisions are a key part of making rankings and should be reflected.

I’m also looking for a way to reflect the credibility accruing to fighters being ranked in the top 25 by those sites that rank in greater depth. Since a first place vote is worth 10 points and a 10th place vote is worth 1 point, what should an 11th place vote get a fighter? Do I have to re-engineer the system? Speak up MMA geeks, lets perfect these rankings.

UPDATE: Alright, alright, we’ll drop the hated MMA Ranks from next month’s list. Now that that’s settled, help me figure out how to account for the fighters that are ranked in the top 25 but not in the top 10.

This is a purer and simpler Meta-Rankings, and we believe the most accurate informative rankings anywhere on the web.

Because opinions are like assholes — everybody has one and they all stink — we don’t put up our own subjective fighter rankings, we compile and average the rankings of every credible or popular source we could find online. The full list of sources is in the extended entry.

Note that the points are out of a possible 210.

We retooled our approach to include more sources. We also eliminated the weighting we were doing to favor statistical and fan-voting sites.

The goal is to show how the MMA community rates the fighters, not to bore you with our opinions.

Note that we only include fighters who made the top ten of one of our source sites. That creates some obvious distortions at the bottom of our rankings — Jason Mcdonald for example is not even considered top 20 by most sources, but somebody out there considers him a top 10 middleweight.

We combined the following heavyweight top 10 rankings: Wamma, MMA Fighting, MMA-ELO, MMA Ranks, Full Contact Fighter, TAGG Radio, 411 Mania, MMA Weekly, Sherdog, Cage Potato, MMA Madness, MMA on Tap, Five Ounces of Pain, FightMatrix, MMA Playground, HD Net/Inside MMA, MMA-ValeTudo Japan, Brawl Sports, Total MMA, Fighters Magazine and Figure Four Online — giving 10 points for a first place rank, 1 point for a tenth place ranking.

The following sources were checked but were not current enough for inclusion: MMA News, InsideFighting, World Fight.