Please forgive the late posting of the November meta-rankings. My family Thanksgiving vacation ate a week of the month and Comcast's continuing failure to get the internet set up at my new apartment did the rest.

Lots of changes in the rankings from October and several big big matchups coming up too. The perenially overrated Takanori Gomi is finally falling to #7, ironically after a questionable decision loss to #23 Sergey Golyaev. Gomi will nevertheless fight #19 Satoru Kitaoka at the January WVR/Sengoku event for their lightweight belt. If Kitaoka wins, expect him to continue to rise in the rankings, but a Gomi win shouldn't do much for Takanori. I will be astonished if Goyaev remains ranked in the coming months.

The people booking the matches for K-1's NYE event must be reading the Meta-rankings because the NYE matches between #2 Eddie Alvarez and #3 Shinya Aoki and #5 Joachim Hansen vs #6 Gesias "JZ" Calvancante are pretty ideal and will ideally set up a springtime match between the winners. If the fights come to satisfying conclusions we should have a good handle on the pecking order in the DREAM/K-1 organization.

Meanwhile on the UFC side, #4 Sean Sherk's win over #22 (and former #13) Tyson Griffin seems to have finally won Sherk some long-overdue recognition from the rankers. Its too bad that he underperformed so badly against #1 B.J. Penn. There's no demand for a Sherk-Penn rematch.

I expected #8 Kenny Florian to get more of a bump from pwning #14 Joe Stevenson but I think the rankings are not yet reflecting that win fully. If B.J. beats GSP and takes the welterweight belt, I wouldn't be surprised to see a Sherk vs Florian rematch for the vacant lightweight belt.

It would be an ironic turn of events for the UFC 155lb class to come full circle after such an effort to build the division. The difference between a Sherk/Florian title match in 2009 from their 2006 title fight will be that few will question the two have earned the right to fight for one of the most prestigious belts in MMA.

If B.J. loses to GSP, there's no telling how things will go. I'd say there's a good chance he returns to lightweight and breaks KenFlo's spirit the way he did JoeDaddy's.

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.

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 45 fighters were ranked in the top 25 by one source or another. For reasons of sanity I only track the top 25 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. Each site consulted awards a total of 325 points. Fuller explanation below.

Rankings were compiled from the following sites: MMA Fighting, MMA-ELO, FC Fighter, Tagg Radio,  MMA Weekly, Sherdog, Cage Potato, FightMatrix,  MMA Playground, HDNet/Inside MMA, VT/MMA (Japanese), Houston Chronicle Brawl Sports, Total MMA, FightMagazine, MMA Ratings, WAMMA, MMA EQ, Five Ounces of Pain, MMA News, Inside Fighting, MMA 4 Real, and MMA Blogger.

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.