When you have a card like UFC 177, which was completely devoid of ranked fighters after the main event, the rankings don’t really experience much in the way of change. For the most part, that was the case this week, but the biggest changes in the rankings involved Renan Barao, who didn’t fight at all on Saturday, and Joe Soto, who was Barao’s replacement and is now ranked in the top 15. He didn’t overtake Mike Easton, who is inexplicably still ranked at #14 despite no wins in his last 4 fights.
While Soto lost to T.J. Dillashaw in the main event, he acquitted himself well enough to earn the 15th spot in bantamweight. As for Barao, he was moved down the P4P list along with Johny Hendricks. Ronda Rousey now moves into the top 8.
You can view the UFC rankings here, as well as click the drop-down menu to see the individual ballots submitted by each media panelist. Bloody Elbow is represented this week by Fraser Coffeen and T.P. Grant.
Pound-For-Pound: As previously mentioned, Barao is #9, Johny Hendricks falls to 10th, while Rousey goes two spots up to 8th.
Flyweight: Tim Elliott takes 9th place while Zach Makovsky moves down to 10th. Brad Pickett also drops a spot at 11th.
Bantamweight: Joe Soto usurps Yves Jabouin at the 15th position. Eddie Wineland, for whatever reason, is pushed to 5th at the expense of the now-6th Takeya Mizugaki. Johnny Eduardo takes 8th spot while Bryan Caraway is knocked down to 9th.
Women’s Bantamweight: Bethe Correia goes up to 9th after her win over Shayna Baszler. Jessica Andrade is now 10th.
Featherweight: No changes
Lightweight: No changes
Welterweight: No changes
Middleweight: Tim Boetsch moves up to 13th, dropping Mark Munoz to 14th.
Light Heavyweight: Glover Teixeira is tied for 3rd with Rashad Evans, while Anthony Johnson goes from 4th to 5th. Dan Henderson reclaims 7th while Ryan Bader drops to 8th, which makes no sense at all, but I’m not on the panel.
Heavyweight: Minotauro Nogueira and Stefan Struve swap the 12 and 13 positions, with Big Nog moving up a notch.