Bloody Elbow October MMA Meta-Rankings: Light Heavyweight

First let me apologize for these rankings running almost two weeks after they were compiled. Just pretend you're in a time machine going back to before the last two UFCs.

This means that #18 Luis Arthur Cane and #10 Rameau Thierry Sokoudjou will almost certainly change places (or close to it) and #17 Brandon Vera will likely drop entirely from the rankings.

Other than that, not a great deal of commentary to add to these. The UFC has an overwhelming dominance of this division. To the point that I just feel bad for the top fighters on the outside looking in. 

#12 Antonio Rogerio Nogeuira will be fighting next weekend at WVR's SENGOKU VI against the unranked Moise Rimbon. #15 Renato "Babalu" Sobral will be fighting the unranked Bobby Southworth at Strikeforce: Destruction. Both these guys are in must-win positions here but at least they're staying active. As for #14 Vladimir Matyushenko, he was supposed to fight Little Nog at Affliction 2. No word on what's next for "The Janitor."

#13 Tito Ortiz remains unsigned, after once again expressing confidence that he was only days away from signing a deal, this time with CBS. The EliteXC collapse puts him back into exile. Maybe he'll run into #20 Ricardo Arona there. #23 Rafael "Feijao" Cavalcante is the only Meta-ranked fighter in the awful contractual limbo resulting from the EliteXC collapse.

Richard has added some very cool charts, including the standings of each fighter in the top 25 against top 10 and top 25 competition. Thanks Richard!

NOTE: The Meta-Rankings are not the subjective opinion of the BloodyElbow team, but rather a compilation of the rankings of over twenty leading MMA web sites. It is our opinion that these are the most informative MMA rankings anywhere.

Thanks to Richard for the charts above and his help in compiling this month's Meta-rankings.

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 43 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: MMA-ELO, FightMatrix, HDNet/Inside MMA, MMA/VT, Total MMA, Fight Magazine, FCFighter, MMA Playground, Houston Chronicle Brawl Sports, MMA Ratings, Fighters.com, MMA Fighting, TAGG Radio, 411 Mania, MMA Weekly, and Cage Potato.

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.