USAT/SBN December MMA Consensus Rankings: Heavyweight

Rankings compiled by Richard Wade.

I thought it would be fun this month to compare the rankings with the rankings we did one year ago to see what's changed.

One thing that hasn't changed is #1 Fedor Emelianenko's lock on the top spot. Over the last twelve months, his convincing wins over #12 Andre Arlvoski (was #3 one year ago) and #9 Brett Rogers (was unranked a year ago) have only solidified that position. Certainly Fedor has faced the toughest competition he's faced in a long time in the last 18 months with Arlovski, Rogers and #15 Tim Sylvia (was #6) being the toughest three straight fights he's had since entering PRIDE against Semmy Schilt, Heath Herring (was #19 in 2008) and #3 Antonio Rodrigo Nogueira (was #2 in 2008) back in 2002-2003.

Fedor will fight again on CBS in April. His opponent is TBD but #10 Alistair Overeem (was #11) and #11 Fabricio Werdum (was #9) have both been mentioned as possibilities.

Despite only fighting once in the last year, #2 Brock Lesnar lept up five spots from #7 one year ago. His emphatic win over #4 Frank Mir (was #10) in July clearly established him in the minds of MMA fans as a top fighter. Mir's rise comes from his beating Nogueira at UFC 92 and #18 Cheick Kongo (was #16). Nogueira's thorough domination of #17 Randy Couture (was #5) helped establish Mir's bona fides as well.

Lesnar is, of course, in career limbo as we await word on his recovery from diverticulitis. In the meantime, #8 Shane Carwin (was #25) might have to beat Mir to hold his place in line for the first shot at Lesnar. Carwin's meteoric rise over the last year can only be attributed to his dramatic win over #13 Gabriel Gonzaga (was #8) and his status as the UFC's anointed #1 contender.

Nogueira on the other hand is penciled in to face #6 Cain Velasquez (was #21) at UFC 110 in Australia. Velasquez earned his way up the old fashioned way; he fought three times in 2009, beating Denis Stojnic, Kongo and #19 Ben Rothwell (was #13) in 2009. The winner of that fight will certainly be due for a title shot. 

#5 Junior Dos Santos (was #17) added another MMA legend to his victims list in 2009 by beating #28 Mirko "Cro Cop" Filipovic (was #12) and Stefan Struve in 2009. He'll face #22 Gilbert Yvel at UFC 108. Dos Santos had been expecting to face Gonzaga before a nasty case of staph took Napao out of that bout.

No word on what's next for #7 Josh Barnett (was #4). He had a bad 2009, despite winning his only fight by beating Yvel at Affliction: Day of Reckoning in January. A failed drug test that cost him his license to fight in California and a shot at Fedor in August still looms over his career. Rumors persist that he'll eventually fight Fedor in DREAM or Strikeforce (if he can work out his problems with the CSAC). Fans of catch wrestling can cling to hope that Barnett will eventually redeem himself, but there are very few of us left.

NOTE: What the hell is Ray Mercer doing in the rankings?!?!

For those of you who are not familiar with how we do the consensus rankings: we do not add any subjective opinion to the rankings. Instead they are a compilation and averaging of the top 20 or so most credible and popular online ranking sites. The goal is not to create an subjective ranking of who is the best fighter but rather to objectively document which fighters are considered to be the best by the online community.

Ray Mercer sneaks into our top 25 because he is ranked at #14 by FightMatrix.com a computer-based objective rankings system. They assign points to fighters strictly based on the rankings of the opponents those fighters have beaten. When Ray Mercer beat Tim Sylvia, Sylvia was ranked in the top 13. By FightMatrix' protocols that caused Mercer to leapfrog above Sylvia even as Sylvia dropped.

Because most of our ranking sites stop at the top 10, those sites that rank the full top 25 have an outsized influence on the lower end of our rankings, ergo Mercer sneaks into our top 25. It doesn't mean we think he's the 25th best heavyweight in the world, it means that he beat a highly regarded fighter in Tim Sylvia and that caused some fairly influential members of the MMA community to consider him a top heavyweight.

Based on the premise that all MMA rankings are subjective but that it’s still useful and informative to know who the online MMA community as a whole ranks as the best fighters in MMA, we collect and average the rankings of the top MMA websites to produce our consensus rankings. Show more "

We compile the top MMA rankings from each of our sources and award 25 points 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. This formula ensures that each ranking site awards the same number of total points regardless of how many fighters they choose to rank. Each fighter’s total is divided by the number of possible points to determine their standing in the Consensus Rankings.