August's MMA Nation Consensus Rankings are now live. The biggest changes to this month's rankings came in the Middleweight and Welterweight divisions with Jake Shields move back to 185. There was also a minor effect on the Lightweight rankings with Frankie Edgar announcing that he'll drop to featherweight.
Aside from those announcements there was relatively little change at the tops of the divisions. Flyweight added a new fighter to its top 10 after John Moraga destroyed Ulysses Gomez at UFC on Fox, but that's the extent of it.
There was one upset this month. However, our panelists by and large completely missed or ignored Tyson Nam's defeat of Bellator champion Eduardo Dantas at a Shooto Americas event. It happened near the end of the month and I think we can expect to see it represented in the September rankings.
There were largely no other notable upsets and when you get the expected results you are left with little to no movement in the rankings. Lyoto Machida's defeat of Ryan Bader was enough to inch him above Mauricio Rua after Rua struggled to put away Brandon Vera, but that was all we had.
Hopefully no major events get cancelled in September.
Details of our methodology in the full entry.
Based on the premise that all MMA rankings are subjective but that it’s still useful and informative to know who the MMA community as a whole ranks as the best fighters in MMA, we collect and average the rankings of the top MMA sources 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.
NOTE: We have modified our method of gathering our rankings because the strict scheduling requirements of USA TODAY clash with the more irregular schedules of many of the MMA rankings sites. That was causing us to use a different set of sources almost every month. That combined with the small number of sites doing top 25 rankings was causing the Consensus rankings to have a lower "signal to noise" ratio than we would like -- that is if fighters are going to be moving up or down I would like it to be because there has been a change in the consensus opinion, not a change in our sources. Therefore we have cut back our sources to just those sites that we can depend on to update every month. We have also contacted many of the rankers that only publish top 10 lists and asked them to provide top 25 lists. As always we listen to your suggestions and are always working to improve the USAT/SBN Consensus MMA Rankings.
Also worth noting is that this month we instituted a rule that if a fighter is active in other weight classes he must have competed within a given weight class within the last 365 days in order to be ranked in that class in an attempt to improve the overall quality of our product. In order to be ranked at all, a fighter must have been active within the last 450 days.
Check out the USA TODAY/MMA Nation Consensus Rankings to see who's rising and who's falling.
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