Rankings compiled by Richard Wade.

The biggest story by far in the heavyweight ranks over the last 90 days has been the health of  UFC Heavyweight champion #2 Brock Lesnar. After last week's announcement, we can rest easy that the Minnesotan will be back in action this summer.  He's expected to face the winner of #3 Frank Mir and #8 Shane Carwin's UFC 111interim title match. But Dana White has promised fans that if the winner of that fight is injured and can't make the date with Lesnar, that the winner of UFC 110's bout between #4 Antonio Rodrigo Nogueira and #6 Cain Velasquez. 

As if that wasn't enough action and intrigue, MMA's pre-eminent promotion will also treat us to #5 Junior Dos Santos vs #13 Gabriel Gonzaga at UFC on Versus in March. If Dana White can get right with the voodoo gods or whoever jinxed his Fall and Winter of 2009, he appears to have an incredible series of heavyweight title fights on the horizon.

As for #1 Fedor Emelianenko, he's expected to face #10 Fabricio Werdum at Strikeforce's second CBS show in April. Werdum is no slouch, but it's clear that the UFC champ will be facing a much tougher slate of challengers in the next year than Fedor -- who isn't even Strikeforce's champion. That title belongs to the man tied with Werdum for #10 Alistair Overeem. The champ claims he'll be ready to defend his belt against Fedor in May or June. We'll see what happens.

Meanwhile, rumors continue to swirl that Strikeforce is in talks with #9 Josh Barnett, the owner of the most damaged brand in MMA. If they can sign Barnett,  that will be one more credible opponent for Fedor.

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 #13 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.