Rankings compiled by Richard Wade.

The big news in the LHW division this month is the ten spot leap #6 Ryan Bader made after beating #8 Antonio Rogerio Nogueira at UFC 119.

Other than that, the only ranked LHW to fight in September was #10 Gegard Mousasi who took an easy win over unranked Tatsuya Mizuno at DREAM.16.

Mousasi's standing reflects the difficulty the MMA community is having ranking the Strikeforce LHW division. Mousasi is holding his place in the top 10 presumably because of his recent wins in Japan.

#13 Muhammed "King Mo" Lawal, the man who took Mousasi's Strikeforce title dropped after losing to #16 Rafael "Feijao" Cavalcante. And yet he remains above the man who beat him. This, I think, is largely because Feijao wasn't ranked in the top 25 by much of anyone before he fought Lawal.

The biggest LHW fight coming up in October is #18 Matt Hamill vs #23 Tito Ortiz at UFC 121. The month will also see #25 Cyrille Diabate face off against Alexander Gustafsson at UFC 120.

Fans will have to wait until November 20 for a really big LHW fight -- #2 Lyoto Machida vs #4 Quintion "Rampage" Jackson at UFC 123. That fight will likely determine the #1 contender's spot.

Of course that is pending the outcome of #1 Mauricio "Shogun" Rua vs #3 Rashad Evans which awaits Shogun's recovery from knee surgery.

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. 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.

We are now moving to what JCS of Fight Matrix has described as assumed rankings in an attempt to rank fighters who move between weight classes. This has been the biggest problem with the consensus rankings and we believe this new methodology will rectify that.

Let's take Anderson Silva for instance. 87% (13 of 15) of our panelists have him at Light Heavyweight and 100% (15 of 15) at Middleweight. On the 13 ballots that ranked Silva at 205, we took the average (21.2). We then reduced that number by half the percentage of Light Heavyweight ballots that he was not included on. Say he's not on 30% of them, then we do a 15% penalty on the average that we found in the previous step. That number is then used instead of the usual "normalization number" to provide points from those not ranking the fighter in the weight class in question. This avoids fighters being excessively penalized by confusion about which weight class they belong.