BloodyElbow November MMA Meta-Rankings: Featherweight

Promoted from the fanposts by Kid Nate. Richard always helps out with the metas, this time he's going above and beyond. Thanks Richard!

The WEC remains the dominant promotion for featherweights with 10 of the top 25 and six of the top 10 calling it their home (10 & four last month).

WEC 36 & 37 had a fairly substantial impact on the rankings.  #2 Mike Brown's TKO of #1 Urijah Faber in the main event  of 36 locked them in a tie at the top.  And #11 Leonard Garcia's destruction of #13 Jens Pulver launched him up the ladder to #3 ahead of WEC debutante, #3 Wagnney Fabiano who successully felled #7 Akitoshi Tamura at 37 where #21 Cub Swanson defeated #14 Hiroyuki Takaya.

Oddly enough, winners Swanson and Fabiano each fell a spot while loser Takaya rose one.

Sadly, my knowledge of the featherweight scene doesn't extend across the Pacific, so anything those of you more knowledgeable can add would be much appreciated.  Also, I don't normally do the write-ups for these, so please cut me a little slack if it's terrible.  Also, some of you will be happy to see that Octagon Buzz was not included in the rankings.

NOTE: The Meta-Rankings are not the subjective opinion of the BloodyElbow team or myself, 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.

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 50 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.

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.