I jumped welterweight ahead in the line because of tonight's Jake Shields/Nick Thompson match which will definitely impact the rankings. The winner of that fight will be the highest ranked, non-Zuffa welterweight. Of course, Jake Shields already is.

In strong contrast to the heavyweight division, Zuffa/UFC/WEC are utterly dominant. If you fight at 170lbs, the big fights are in the UFC. Coming up we've got #1 GSP vs #2 Jon Fitch; #3 Thiago Alves vs #7 Diego Sanchez,  #9 Parisyan vs #13 Yoshida, etc etc.

This creates a dilemma for Jake Shields, if he beats Nick Thompson, who's next? Carlos Condit has a similar quandry and he's under contract to Zuffa's WEC. If he beats Hiromitsu Miura at WEC 35, then he's looking at a rematch against the winner of Larson/Prater. Not exactly a step up.

It'll be interesting to see where IFL champ Jay Hieron goes. I think he'd be a very logical challenger for Condit's title. Honestly, if Condit defends his belt 3 more times, I would really want to see him in the UFC.

There are a few lingerers here -- Diaz, Riggs and Penn who formerly fought at this weight and the memo doesn't seem to have reached the MMA community that they've moved on.

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.