Here are this month's middleweight Meta-rankings. As always keep in mind that these are not our opinion, rather a compilation of the rankings issued by leading MMA web sites.

Middleweight continues to be a somewhat muddled division, although it is very clear that Anderson Silva is the best at 185. So much so in fact that he makes the rest of the division look bad, particularly the rest of the UFC middleweights. Therefore, despite having 10 (12 with the WEC) of the top 25 middleweights in the world under contract, the UFC is faced with a serious drought of good matchups for Silva.

One of the problems has been the pattern the UFC fell into of rushing middleweights into title contention. The lack of depth in the weight class forced them to rush a succession of fighters into title shots -- Silva, Marquardt, Henderson, Lutter without having faced other serious contenders. Only Rich Franklin on his way to a rematch for his lost belt had to get past a serious contender -- Okami. IMO if Henderson or Marquardt had faced one another and/or Franklin before fighting for the belt, it would have made their title challenges to Silva more intriguing if equally futile.

Seemingly Yushin Okami, the #5 rated middleweight in the world and the last man to get a victory over Silva (albeit by DQ) would have been the best challenger. Unfortunately Okami broke his hand and now Silva will face Patrick Cote. Cote is ranked #14 but IMO he's puffed up due to having been on a very fast track to title contention. His recent wins have either been unimpressive (Almeida) or over weak competition (Grove, McFedries, Smith, Day). I do not believe at all that Cote could get past Henderson, Franklin, Marquardt, Leites, Bisping, Kampmann or even Maia or Palhares so its really uninteresting to see him get a title shot. 

The second problem in the division has been the scattering of the other top fighters to different promotions: Filho in WEC, Lawler in EliteXC, Lindland to Affliction, Misaki and Trigg to WVR, Akiyama, Mousasi, Souza in DREAM. With the exception of the DREAM fighters, none of the other promotions offer the level of competition worthy of a top 5 fighter. Sure it'll be fun to see Lindland vs Belfort but a win will propel neither fighter to the top.

Middleweight also is unique among weightclasses in that two of its biggest draws are not seen as top contenders -- Cung Le and Frank Shamrock. Perhaps both fighters are top 25 in ability, but they haven't faced the level of competition recently to prove it. It will be interesting to see how Strikeforce uses Misaki. I'd love to see the Grabaka hitman against Shamrock or Le, but I expect they'll want to let Misaki get a win or two under his belt first. Would also be interesting to see Shamrock vs Lawler for the EliteXC belt, that's a fight Shamrock could win IMO. But I expect Shamrock to face Rua or Villasenor first while Lawler heals his split open head. No word on Shamrock's recovery time from the broken arm and I can't believe he'll fight wearing braces.

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 40 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: 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, FFightMatrix, MMA Playground, HDNet/Inside MMA, MMAVT (Japan), and Total MMA. Figure 4 Online hadn't updated their rankings when I did the math on these, I'll include them when I do the lightweights.

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.