Commentary by Kid Nate: Another month, another exciting installment of the Bloody Elbow Meta Rankings. 

Fedor Emelianenko remains the undisputed #1 in every ranking we surveyed after his first round KO of #3 Andrei Arlovski at the second Affliction event. #2 Josh Barnett is likely to be Fedor's next opponent if there is another Affliction event or some sort of cross-promotion deal is worked out. Cross your fingers but don't hold your breath.

The rest of the top ten seems to have finally sorted itself out after the mammoth upsets at UFC 91 and 92. #4 Frank Mir  and #5 Antonio Rodrigo Noguiera have settled as a block just a notch above #6 Brock Lesnar and #7 Randy Couture. Mir and Lesnar will both enter the Octagon at UFC 98 in April with championship belts. The winner will have made a definitive case for himself as the best in the UFC and a clear #2 heavyweight in the world.

#8 Tim Sylvia is on a sad road to utter irrelevance with a rumored matchup against former has-been boxer turned MMA novelty attraction Ray Mercer. I really have a hard time envisioning a return to contention in a serious promotion for Sylvia.

#9 Gabriel Gonzaga will face #24 Shane Carwin at UFC 96 in a match expected to send the winner on the road to title contention. The big question in my mind, is who would the winner fight before getting a title shot? Where are #14 Junior Dos Santos, #18 Cheick Kongo, #21 Cain Velasquez .and #23 Heath Herring in Joe Silva's plans?

The other big question is where will #10 Alistair Overeem land? He was seen hanging with Dana White at UFC 93 and is in hot demand with only a couple of fights left on his contract with DREAM. He would be very useful to the UFC in their attempts to expand into Europe. He is also the Strikeforce Heavyweight champion and its possible that Scott Coker and company will be able to lure him back to fight for them.

NOTE: The Meta-Rankings are not the subjective opinion of the BloodyElbow team, but rather a compilation of the rankings of over twenty leading MMA web sites. It is our opinion that these are the most informative MMA rankings anywhere.

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 percentage of possible points, they're a much more telling number than the ranking.

A total of 39 fighters were ranked in the top 25 by one source or another, for reasons of sanity I only track the top 25 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 16 following sites: Cage Potato, Fight Matrix, Fight Magazine, Five Ounces of Pain, Inside MMA, MMA 4 Real, MMA ELO, MMA Fighting, MMA on Tap, MMA Playground, MMA Rocks, MMA Weekly, Sherdog, TAGG Radio, Total MMA & WAMMA.

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.