Commentary by Kid Nate Richard:  People finally realized #1 Mike Thomas Brown defeated #2 Urijah Faber in November and he now has the top spot all to himself.  Faber's second win over #22 Jens Pulver did nothing for him, but knocked Pulver out of the top 20.  #3 Wagnney Fabiano surpassed #4 Leonard Garcia likely on the strength of having fought more recently.

Although inactive since the last rankings, it seems many sites had not yet credited #6 Takeshi Inoue for his November 29 win over #11 Hideki Kadowaki.

#7 Dokonjonosuke Mishima's win over unranked Toshiaki Kitada helped to leapfrog him over inactive fighters.

#13 L.C. Davis' win over "gatekeeper" #23 Bao Quach at Affliction: Day of Reckoning launched him 18 spots while dropping Quach 4.  Similarly, #14 Jose Aldo's win over relative nobody Rolando Perez  the next day shot him up 19 spots.

#16 Cub Swanson's win over #27 Hiroyuki Takaya was enough to move him into the top 20.

Previously unranked Daisuke Nakamura debuts at #24 thanks to his New Year's Eve victory over #42 Hideo Tokoro.

#25 Dominic Cruz' win at bantamweight against Ian McCall seems to have been enough to sneak him into 25th on the featherweight rankings.

WEC: Brown vs. Garcia on March 1 will pit #1 Mike Thomas Brown against #4 Leonard Garcia.  #14 Jose Aldo will also be on the card.

NOTE: The Meta-Rankings are not the subjective opinion of the BloodyElbow team or myself, 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. There's clearly a huge gulf between the top 9 fighters and those that follow.

A total of 46 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.

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.