Bloody Elbow June Meta-Rankings: Lightweight

Sorry for the delay in finishing up the June Meta-rankings. We'll get them out faster in July.

Not a lot of surprises in this months Lightweight ranks. B.J. Penn is viewed by most as the top lightweight in the world but not everyone agrees yet. I think this is a hangover of the attitude that he hadn't fought in the division in a long time and because none of the fighters he's beaten in his current UFC 155lb run -- Pulver, Stevenson, Sherk -- have competed recently against any of the top Japanese fighters that have dominated the rankings in this division for most of the decade. Gomi has lost a bit of luster due to competing in WVR's Sengoku and facing less than stellar competition. Personally I thought losing to Diaz (NC, whatever) and Aurelio knocked him off the top spot a long time ago. He just hasn't been the same fighter since 2005.

Aoki's run at the DREAM grand prix title has his stock rising. If he gets past Uno and Alvarez/Kawajiri, he'll likely contend with Penn for the consensus #1. If any of the other fighters in the tourny wins it all, they'll rise of course, but I won't expect them to make #1 anytime soon. Alvarez has the most to gain and could catapult way up there off a strong performance in DREAM followed by a big performance for Elite XC.

These rankings were mostly issued before Melendez lost to Josh Thomson. I meant to catch them all before that fight happened, sorry. Next month as the impact of that fight sinks in, Melendez will drop further and Thomson will rise accordingly. No idea what's next for Gilbert, hopefully he'll sign on with DREAM or WVR and face some top talent in Japan. I'd be surprised if the UFC signed him off two straight losses. Ishida's stock will fall further due to Melendez's loss -- beating Gilbert was his biggest feat. Josh Thomson has an unfortunately limited pool of competition in Strikeforce. Would love to see him go up against Gomi or take on K.J. Noons in Elite XC.

I expect the winner of Florian/Huerta will rise considerably.

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

Because opinions are like assholes -- everybody has one and they all stink -- we don't put up our own subjective fighter rankings, we compile and average the rankings of every credible or popular source we could find online. The full list of sources is in the extended entry.

Note that the points are out of a possible 210.

We retooled our approach to include more sources. We also eliminated the weighting we were doing to favor statistical and fan-voting sites.

The goal is to show how the MMA community rates the fighters, not to bore you with our opinions.

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 -- Spencer Fisher for example is not even considered top 20 by most sources, but somebody out there considers him a top 10 lightweight.

We combined 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 and Figure Four Online -- giving 10 points for a first place rank, 1 point for a tenth place ranking.

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

We'll drop the hated MMA Ranks from next month's list but I wanted to include them in this ranking for consistency throughout June.

Not sure if we'll have the time and ambition to account for fighters ranked in the top 25 or not, but thanks to BE reader JCS_FM I have a handle on a good way to do it. Thanks!