Alright, here's the first installment of the July MMA Meta-Rankings. As I've said before, we believe the Bloody Elbow Meta-Rankings are the most informative system out there if you want to know who's highly regarded by the MMA community.

I've made some major adjustments this month. Thanks to the brain trust at Fight Matrix, I was able to include top 25 rankings instead of just top 10 lists. I think this gives a better perspective of how the MMA community evaluates fighters.

The biggest movement this month came from the Affliction event. Arlovski jumped several slots based on his impressive performance over Rothwell. Sylvia's fetal position loss to Fedor drops him a couple of slots. Alistair Overeem's win over Mark Hunt at the last DREAM event, combined with his demolition of Paul Buentello at Strikeforce a while back has the Dutchman cruising up the charts. I hope we'll get to see Alistair against some more top competition soon.

I expect a win by Antonio Silva over Justin Eilers for the EliteXC belt will cause him to shoot several slots higher. Nothing moves a fighter up the rankings like exposure. Ask Cain Velasquez. Dude's on the fast track after his beat down of Jake O'Brien on the free Spike TV UFN last week.

More on the methodology in the full entry.

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 42 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: TAGG Radio, MMA News, Sherdog, Cage Potato, MMA On Tap, Five Ounces of Pain, Houston Chronicle's Brawl Sports, WAMMA, MMA Fighting, MMA-ELO, FCFighter, 411 Mania, MMA Madness, FightMatrix, MMA Playground, HDNet/Inside MMA, MMAVT (Japan), and Total MMA. Figure 4 Online hadn't updated their rankings for July.

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.