The biggest fight coming up this month is #3 Thiago Alves vs #6 Diego Sanchez at UFC 90.The winner will get a title shot against GSP (or B.J. Penn?) in 2009 and will likely emerge as the consensus #2 fighter. I'm probably more stoked about that fight than any other coming up in October. Both fighters are riding hot streaks and have significantly improved their game this year.

#4 Jake Shields will face Paul Daley at EliteXC on October 4th. Daley's not ranked in the top 25 but does come in at #41 and IMO is a bit tougher than that. Shields stands a real chance of losing here, but won't gain much by a win. If Affliction continues to work with EliteXC there are some interesting possibilities for Shields, including #21 Jay Hieron.

At UFC 89 on the 18th we'll see #15 Akihiro Gono vs #22 Dan Hardy, #18 Marcus Davis vs the unranked Paul Kelly, #25 Chris Lytle vs the unranked Paul Taylor and #19 David Baron leaving the division to fight Jim Miller at 155lbs. Gono vs Hardy is the face-off I'm most intrigued by. The winner could be climbing up the contender ladder in the UFC. The other fights pretty much pit UFC favorites who have been eliminated from contention against UK fighters. Kelly could possibly go places if he beats Davis, but that seems unlikely.

ABOUT THE META-RANKINGS: A full methodology is in the extended entry, but the short version is that they are a compilation of the rankings of 20+ leading MMA web sites and magazines. In short the meta-rankings don't represent the opinion of me or the Bloody Elbow staff, rather they are an attempt to quantify the consensus opinions of the MMA online community at large.

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 45 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: WAMMA, MMA Fighting, MMA-ELO, FCFighter, TAGG Radio, 411 Mania, MMA Weekly, Sherdog, Cage Potato, MMA On Tap, FightMatrix, MMA Playground,  HDNet/Inside Fighting, MMA/VT, Total MMA, Inside Fighting, Figure 4 Online, Houston Chronicle Brawl Sports, MMA 4 Real, Fight Magazine, and MMA Ratings.

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.