In the wake of such a dominating performance over arguably the best LHW of all time, my mind raced at future challengers for jones.  After exhausting the thought of anyone in the current 205 landscape beating jones as well as considering how well jones matches up with anderson on paper, the obvious next step was to look at heavyweight challengers.  I decided that jones would be an underdog to cain, overeem and junior dos santos, and started wondering how he would do against other fighters.  This led me to the idea of making openweight rankings.

Of course pound for pound rankings are more accurate in terms of describing the most skilled fighters in the world, but openweight rankings are more real world applicable:  who would kick whose ass in a fight?  if all fighters were gladiators in hand to hand combat, who would be the best?  im as big a nuthugger of joe-ze aldo as anyone out there but there are at least 200 fighters out there who would win in a fight to the death with him.

Since these rankings are comparing fighters in different divisions that face an entirely different crop of fighters from each other, I am basing my rankings more on opinions about their skill levels/skillsets and my opinion on their odds to win against other fighters than actual accomplishments.  In theory, my rankings are basically a summation of that fighter's EV of winning against the other fighters in the top 50.  For example, say cain is .55 to win vs overeem, .65 to win vs JDS, .7 to win vs jones, .9 to win vs brock, .75 to win vs carwin etc, i add up those percentages and that is the fighters score.  I'm a far too lazy to actually go through all 1225 matchups, come up with percentages to win for each fighter so instead I am just mentally ballparking figures based on that method of thinking.

This tends to lead to fighters ranked lower than another fighter within a division but higher ranked here.  For example, despite rashad winning a heavyweight season on TUF, i tend to think he "moves up in weight" worse than forrest because hes much smaller, a worse striker, and it will be harder for him to get takedowns on huge guys than it is at 205.  There are just so many spots up for debate it is very hard to accurately rank after #8, but here goes nothing.

I also decided to stop after 25 guys because I thought it would lead to adding too many fat heavyweights.

Here are my openweight rankings for 3/20/2011:

1. cain velasquez

2. alistair overeem

3. junior dos santos

4. jon jones

5. brock lesnar

6. shane carwin

7. fabricio werdum

8. antonio silva

9. anderson silva

10. fedor emelianenko

11. frank mir

12. josh barnett

13. sergei kharitonov

14. brendan schaub

15. shogun rua

16. lyoto machida

17. rampage jackson

18. cole konrad

19. dave herman

20. forrest griffin

21. roy nelson

22. rashad evans

23. big nog

24. brett rogers

25. GSP

Again there are a lot of weird things about this list.  I have little doubt guys like ben rothwell, cheick kongo or or andrei arlovski would be favorites against GSP as they are just infinitely larger than him and competent fighters.  however GSP is just so well rounded that he can have a good chance to beat so many guys that are bigger than him that would fare quite well against those guys.  Similarly i think gsp would be a favorite against big nog and rashad at this point in time, but hes too small to beat some other fighters that they would handle quite easily. 

I pretty much thought the top 8 guys were almost automatic choices in that order, then i had a lot of trouble dispersing the lower weight fighters amongst the heavyweights.  Ah well, all comments/thoughts/criticisms/death threats appreciated