Commentary by Kid Nate: Now that #1 Georges St Pierre has definitively rebuffed the challenge of #1 lightweight B.J. Penn, or did he really....ok ok we'll leave greasegate out of this.

#2 Thiago Alves will get his shot at the crown at UFC 100 in July. The AKA boys -- #3 Jon Fitch, #4 Josh Koscheck and #11 Mike Swick -- are all circling, looking for their shots.

Of the three, Koscheck would seem to be the closest to a title shot. If he beats the virtually unknown Paulo Thiago this saturday at UFC 95, he'll likely fight again at UFC 98 against a top contender. It was going to be #9 Karo Parisyan but after Karo's drug test failure at UFC 94, that doesn't seem likely.

Swick is out with a foot injury that will keep him from fighting again until late spring or early summer. No word on what's next for Jon Fitch after disposing of #25 Akihiro Gono at UFC 94.

#5 Jake Shields is rumored to be willing to fight for Strikeforce and forgo moving to the UFC for the time being. This leaves WEC champ #6 Carlos Condit as virtually the only fresh potential challenger for GSP. Condit will possibly be facing former middleweight Martin Kampmann in his UFC debut and the winner should be fast-tracked into contention.

#7 Diego Sanchez is making his lightweight debut at UFC 95. I expect it will take a few months for the sources we use to compile the Metas to reflect that change. Nothing jacks with the meta rankings like fighters changing weight classes.

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. There's clearly a huge gulf between the top 9 fighters and those that follow.

A total of 49 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 the following 17 sites: 411 Mania, Fight Magazine, Fight Matrix , Five Ounces of Pain, Inside MMA, MMA 4 Real, MMA ELO, MMA Fighting, 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.