Bloody Elbow Meta-Rankings: Heavyweight

by Kid Nate on Jun 24, 2008 7:00 PM EDT in Rankings Comment 22 comments

Fighter	Points	Promotion
1. Fedor Emelianenko	186	Affliction
2. Antonio Rodrigo Noguiera	180	UFC
3. Randy Couture	154	***
4. Josh Barnett	115	Affliction/WVR
5. Tim Sylvia	111	Affliction/Adrenaline
6. Andrei Arlovski	109	Affliction
7. Fabricio Werdum	93	UFC
8. Gabriel Gonzaga	47	UFC
9. Mirko Filipovic	36	DREAM
10. Ben Rothwell	24	Affliction/Adrenaline
11. Aleksander Emelianenko	10	Affliction
12. Heath Herring	9	UFC
13. Frank Mir	7	UFC
14. Cheick Kongo	5	UFC
15. Jake O'Brien	6	UFC
16. Brandon Vera	4	UFC
16. Tengiz Tedoradze	4	Cage Rage/Ultimate Force

Presenting the relaunch of the Bloody Elbow Meta-Rankings. We took a couple of months off and retooled our approach to include more sources. We also eliminated the weighting we were doing to favor statistical and fan-voting sites.

This is a purer and simpler Meta-Rankings, and we believe the most accurate rankings anywhere on the web.

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.

We'll be rolling out the rest of the June rankings over the next week or so and will be back next month with the next round.

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 seven fighters and those that follow. And clearly, only a handful of sites consider Frank Mir a top 10 contender.

Note that we only include fighters who made the top ten of one of our source sites. That creates some obvious distortions at the bottom of our rankings -- Tengiz Tedoradze for example is not even considered a top 30 by most sources, but somebody out there considers him a top 10 heavyweight. Full list of sources in the extended entry.

Note that there are a maximum of 200 points possible. So Fedor has 186/200 and Tengiz has 4/200. Helps put things in perspective.

We averaged the following heavyweight top 10 rankings: Wamma, MMA Fighting, MMA-ELO, MMA Ranks, Full Contact Fighter, TAGG Radio, 411 Mania, MMA Weekly, Sherdog, Cage Potato, MMA Madness, MMA on Tap, Five Ounces of Pain, FightMatrix, MMA Playground, HD Net/Inside MMA, MMA-ValeTudo Japan, Brawl Sports, Total MMA, Fighters Magazine.

The following sources were checked but were not current enough for inclusion: MMA News, InsideFighting, World Fight.

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Comments

Yay, I’ve been wondering where these have been.

Cue 3 responses saying your rankings suck.

by Mike Fagan on Jun 24, 2008 7:24 PM EDT reply actions 0 recs

No Mike, I won’t say that.

But I would love to know which of these goofy ranking bodies drank until they thought TENGIZ TEDORADZE was a top ten heavyweight.

Wait, let me guess. It was MMA Ranks, wasn’t it?

by Brett Jones on Jun 24, 2008 7:38 PM EDT reply actions 0 recs

you are correct sir

and not only that, they rank him at #7 even though he’s 0-3 against fighters they rank on their own charts.

by Kid Nate on Jun 24, 2008 9:37 PM EDT up reply actions 0 recs

Great job Nate...

...you are the man…and I am teh suck

Contributing Editor - BloodyElbow.com - SBNation's mixed martial arts headquarters.

"The reason a lot of people do not recognize opportunity is because it usually goes around wearing overalls and looking like hard work." -- Thomas Edison

by Brent Brookhouse on Jun 24, 2008 8:38 PM EDT reply actions 0 recs

don't sweat it man

i’ve bought a house before I know how it is.

by Kid Nate on Jun 24, 2008 9:28 PM EDT up reply actions 0 recs

My question is...

Is the Josh Barnett they’re ranking the one with or without steroids? Just curious.

(Bitter FOREVER.)

Don't believe a word I say, I don't train BJJ. -- TangleBones

by jemaleddin on Jun 24, 2008 8:59 PM EDT reply actions 0 recs

Where is Kimbo? These rankings suck!

"They said you was hung!!"

"And they was RIGHT!"

by BJJDenver on Jun 24, 2008 9:54 PM EDT reply actions 0 recs

J/k!! But I’m sure there are people wondering that.

Nobody gave any love to Big Country or Antonio huh?

"They said you was hung!!"

"And they was RIGHT!"

by BJJDenver on Jun 24, 2008 9:55 PM EDT up reply actions 0 recs

well...

...Seeing how bad Ricco looked at YAMMA and then realizing that Silva didn’t exactly have an easy time with him. It is probably making people have second thoughts about him.

Contributing Editor - BloodyElbow.com - SBNation's mixed martial arts headquarters.

"The reason a lot of people do not recognize opportunity is because it usually goes around wearing overalls and looking like hard work." -- Thomas Edison

by Brent Brookhouse on Jun 24, 2008 10:05 PM EDT up reply actions 0 recs

I actually think

that most people consider Antonio a superheavyweight rather than a heavyweight.

by Kid Nate on Jun 24, 2008 11:03 PM EDT up reply actions 0 recs

both good points, but considering he went in with a knee injury…

still, in the mma world, he’ll be top 5 after his next fight, lol.

"They said you was hung!!"

"And they was RIGHT!"

by BJJDenver on Jun 24, 2008 11:37 PM EDT up reply actions 0 recs

I wanna see the lhw of this.

by Tha Realness on Jun 24, 2008 10:29 PM EDT reply actions 0 recs

MMA Ranks has to be the most horrible ranking site ever. How do you take wins away from a fighter?

by Tonley on Jun 25, 2008 3:07 AM EDT reply actions 0 recs

they're not alone

almost every ranking site does things that seem unfair—5 oz decided not to rank Alves over Hughes for not making weight for example. Nick Diaz’ no contest over Gomi is almost never counted against Gomi or for Diaz, but Misaki’s no contest vs Akiyama seems to have been treated as a win by most sites.

by Kid Nate on Jun 25, 2008 10:16 AM EDT up reply actions 0 recs

Is there some sort of qualification you require of ranking sites, or is just any idiot with rankings included in this project?

Intentional Blog on Balls

by Richard Wade on Jun 25, 2008 4:11 AM EDT reply actions 0 recs

basically any idiot is included

I guess you could say sites must have some readership to be included.
Honestly after poring over all these rankings - especially the ones like MMA-ELO and Fightmatrix that have “objective” scoring systems - I’m more convinced than ever that ranking fighters is an almost purely arbitrary exercise. But I think the value comes when you do the totals and see the consensus emerging—there’s a pretty clear agreement about who the top 7 heavyweights in the world are, its only when you get down below that that things get weird.

by Kid Nate on Jun 25, 2008 10:15 AM EDT up reply actions 0 recs

The issue I have with that approach is that there is a small enough number of these rankings that one really lousy site can contaminate the results, but I guess without some sort of objective measure to determine which rankings are included it would just be your opinion and then what’s the point of the meta-rankings?

Intentional Blog on Balls

by Richard Wade on Jun 25, 2008 4:58 PM EDT up reply actions 0 recs

tengiz

you can’t have the “most accurate” rankings if tengiz is #16. Drop MMA Ranks from you poll, that’s a no brainer. Their site looks like it was made by a 5-year old anyways.

you might as well go to a top 20 or 25.

nelson has earned the right to be higher that at least half those stragglers with the UFC towards the back end of your rankings. I’d put my money on carwin before most of those guys.

by turdburgler on Jun 25, 2008 11:30 AM EDT reply actions 0 recs

I'd have to say you're completely missing the point

We’re not reporting on which fighters should be ranked, we’re reporting on what the the online MMA consensus is.
MMA Ranks has been there for a long time and draws a significant audience.
Their decision to include Tengiz is no stupider than MMA Weekly’s stubborn insistence on ranking Denis Kang in the top 10 middleweights long after he’d been drummed out of everyone else’s.
The MMA community is frequently dumb. That is accurately reflected in the Meta-Rankings.
If I start excluding sources because I don’t agree with their rankings then I’m just like every other idiot giving out subjective opinions.
These aren’t rankings—they’re META-rankings.

by Kid Nate on Jun 25, 2008 12:11 PM EDT up reply actions 0 recs