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Serra = St. PIerre
Fickett > Koscheck > Sanchez > Parisyan > Fickett

If you go back to the middleweight graph and compare it to this one, you'll find a pretty stark contrast.  The middleweights have 11 separate fighters atop of paths, while the welterweights have a paltry 6.  On the flip side, the middleweights have 9 cellar dwellars compared to the welterweights 13.

This tell us the welterweights have a much more defined hierarchy.  There's almost a pyramid like quality to the graph compared to Anderson Silva and his wall of contenders at 185. 

If you further extrapolate, you find the graph really only contains two legitimate path heads - Georges St. Pierre and Jon Fitch.  So, it's quite convenient that they square off at UFC 87.  The ramifications need little explanation, a win for either fighter essentially amounts to a Risk-like global domination.

More notes after the break

-I decided to keep guys who made the meta-rankings but didn't have any qualifying fights.  That's why you see the floating blue-green Sakurai and Gono nodes.

-Carlos Condit, top 10 fighter?  FightLines certainly doesn't agree with that notion.  If we accept the fact that St. Pierre, Fitch, Koscheck, Alves, Sanchez, Parisyan, Shields, and Hughes all populate 1-8 in some permutation, that leaves 2 spots for guys like Condit, Serra, Thompson, and others.  Serra probably belongs because of his win over St. Pierre, no matter how flukey it was.  I'd further argue that Nick Thompson, who has a gaudy 20-1 record over 3 years with his lone loss to Karo Parisyan, deserves a spot in the top 10 over Condit.

Being a heavily UFC-centric division, it will be hard for Condit to make up ground in the WEC.

-Majority Leaders:

-Interesting FightLines Match-ups:

The obvious has already been discussed.  St. Pierre/Fitch is a fight that makes sense for numerous reasons, the least of which is the FightLines system.

The recently rumored Sanchez/Alves fight allows Sanchez the chance to reclaim his path to Parisyan, which is looped out because of his loss to Koscheck.

Carlos Condit might find redemption in a match with Jay Hieron.  With the IFL on the ropes and Condit needing challengers, he seems like a good fit.  A win of Hieron would loop out his loss to Healy.

Looking at the graph, I thought Karo should fight someone like Dustin Hazelett or Yoshiyuki Yoshida.  I remembered that there were rumors of Parisyan being rumored to fight someone, and lo and behold he's close to signing an agreement for the Yoshida fight.  I think this is very solid matchmaking.