Another month, another installment of the meta-rankings. This month we added some new sources -- particularly noteworthy is Fight Magazine's new computer generated ranking system. Go check it out and let me know if it's so stupid that I shouldn't include them anymore. They're not bad at heavyweight but seem to overvalue holding titles in smaller organizations and there are some really funny outcomes in other weight divisions.

In the heavyweights, Randy Couture is being punished for inactivity as several of the major ranking sites drop fighters with more than a year without fighting. Otherwise the top 10 is pretty static.

Alistair Overeem's surge can probably be attributed to the hype around his fight tomorrow with Cro Cop -- I'm guessing many rankers had been sleeping on Alistair's recent win streak until they read the DREAM.6 previews.

It's really a bummer that Travis Wiuff won't be fighting Roger Gracie at Sengoku, that would have been an excellent test for the grappling phenom. But I'm beginning to doubt that Roger is serious about being a top level MMA competitor. It's also a drag that Mighty Mo had to drop out of his DREAM.6 fight with Kharitinov, I'd like to see Sergei back in the mix.

On the other hand, its cool to see that Josh Barnett will be on the Sengoku VI card.

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 44 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: FightMatrix, Fight Magazine, MMA 4 Real, Total-MMA, Houston Chronicle/Brawl Sports, MMA/VT (Japan), Inside MMA/HDNet, MMA Playground, Five Ounces of Pain, MMA On Tap, CagePotato, Sherdog, MMA Weekly, 411 Mania, Inside Fighting, TAGG Radio, Full Contact Fighter, MMA-ELO, MMA Fighting, and WAMMA.  Figure 4 Online hadn't updated -- or if they had I couldn't find the column.        

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.