Clearly the big movement in this installment of the metas is the rise of #7 Brock Lesnar jumping all the way from #18 on the strength of beating #5 Randy Couture at UFC 91. Many sites are hesitant to rank Lesnar higher due to his slim record. Lesnar will get a big test when he meets the winner of UFC 92's interim title fight -- #2 Antonio Rodrigo Nogueira or #10 Frank Mir. UFC 92 will also see #16 Cheick Kongo against former Cage Rage champ Mustapha al Turk.

Note that Couture's rise in the standings is due to several sites that hadn't been ranking him due to inactivity ranking him again.

The other big mover is #17 Junior dos Santos who's come out of nowhere after KO'ing #9 Fabricio Werdum. No word on what's next for either fighter although Werdum has made noises about signing with Affliction after getting pink slipped by the UFC.

In January, Affliction is promising to pit #1 Fedor Emelianenko against #3 Andrei Arlovski. At that same event, #4 Josh Barnett will face the unranked Gilbert Yvel in a fight that might have mattered in 2002. The fact that #14 Aleksander Emelianenko is no longer rumored for that bout lends credence to rumors that he can't get health clearance to fight in the states. That card will also feature #25 Paul Buentello against Kiril Sidelnikov.

K-1's New Year's Eve event will see #11 Alistair Overeem face #15 Sergei Kharitonov. That's the best match up those guys could make, since they're wasting #12 Mirko "Cro Cop" Filipovic in a K-1 rules match against Hong Man Choi.

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.

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 27 following sites.

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.