Bloody Elbow August 2008 MMA Meta-Rankings: Heavyweight

Not a lot of commentary to add to this month’s installment of the heavyweight meta-rankings.

Explanations of the methodology are in the full entry. The main thing to know is that the Meta-rankings are not the opinions of the BloodyElbow staff, rather they’re a compilation of the rankings of 19 leading MMA web sites. The goal is not to tell you who we think are the best fighters, but rather to inform you how the MMA blogosphere rates the top fighters.

Affliction has seven of the top twenty-five fighters, but more importantly, they’ve got five of the top ten under contract. The only compelling matchup they have scheduled is also the only interesting heavyweight fight scheduled for the rest of the year — Arlovski/Barnett should be a good fight and the winner will certainly have earned a shot at Fedor. We’ll see if Affliction can book it.

The UFC has nine of twenty-five, Brock Lesnar’s entry into the meta-rankings certainly doesn’t hurt. Expect Shane Carwin to climb into the top 25 soon. DREAM has three of the top guys. WVR/Sengoku sort of has three as well, but Monson probably won’t be fighting for them again and Marcio Cruz is just feeble.

Based on the premise that opinions are like assholes, everybody has one and they all stink. instead of putting up our own subjective fighter rankings, we compile and average the rankings of every source we could find online.

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

Be sure and look at the points, they’re a much more telling number than the ranking. There’s clearly a huge gulf between the top 9 fighters and those that follow.

A total of 39 fighters were ranked in the top 25 by one source or another, for reasons of sanity I only track the top 25 (26 due to a tie) most highly rated fighters.

25 points are awarded for a first place ranking, 16 for a 10th place ranking, 1 for a 25th place ranking. A formula is used to “normalize” the data so all fighters are awarded points from those lists that do not include a full 25 fighters. Fuller explanation below.

Rankings were compiled from the following sites: TAGG Radio, Sherdog, Cage Potato, MMA On Tap, Five Ounces of Pain, Houston Chronicle’s Brawl Sports, WAMMA, MMA Fighting, MMA-ELO, FCFighter, 411 Mania, FightMatrix, MMA Playground, HDNet/Inside MMA, MMAVT (Japan), Figure 4 Online, Fighters.com, MMA Weekly, and Total MMA. MMA News and MMA Madness hadn’t updated their rankings for August.

The normalization scheme as explained by JCS of FightMatrix is here:

The “normalization number” (new name) would be:

120
divided by
(Total Fighters Found in Any List minus 10)

Every fighter found somewhere else, but on a Top 10 list would be assigned this number.

The “normalization” number would not apply to a fighter not found on a Top 25 list. They would simply get 0.

So the process would be:

Do all of the Top 25 lists first, #1 = 25, #2 = 24…. #24 = 2, #25 = 1
Do all of the Top 10 lists, same scoring structure.. stops at #10 = 16

Figure out that normalization variable.

Fill in the normalization variable to all fighters not found in the Top 10 lists, but found elsewhere.

Do your totals and rank.