Bloody Elbow October 2008 MMA Meta-Rankings: Middleweight

As with the Heavyweights and Light-Heavies, these standings were compiled before the last two UFC events. Although I'll be pretty astonished if any of those bouts have a dramatic impact on the standings. For all the bitching, everyone still thinks Anderson Silva is the best at 185.

Despite a continued perception that the UFC middleweight division is weak, with the addition of the WEC middles they've got 13 of the top 25 185'ers in the world. And if Anderson Silva goes ahead and moves up to 205 -- and honestly who's left for him to fight at 185 -- it could be a very fun and competitive battle to claim the belt.

#8 Rich Franklin and #5 Dan Henderson will be facing off at UFC 93 in January. Unfortunately that fight will be at 205lbs. BUT supposedly the winner will coach the next season of TUF to set up a match against British coach #15 Michael Bisping. Of course Franklin claims he's not interested in coaching TUF. I guess we'll see how that turns out. IMO, they should've booked Franklin vs Henderson at 185 instead of Franklin/Hamill and Henderson/Palhares but whatcha gonna do.

#2 Paulo Filho will be re-matching #23 Chael Sonnen at the next WEC on November 5th. This is Filho's chance to prove that rehab works and re-establish himself as a major factor in this division before coming to the UFC. #3 Yushin Okami missed his title shot against Silva due to a broken hand and will be fighting Dean Lister at UFC 92 in a fight that really means nothing unless Okami loses.

The rest of the UFC 185 pack remains a jumble, #6 Nate Marquardt is surging off his demolition of #19 Martin Kampmann. #13 Thales Leites dodged a bullet when Goran Reljic (#24 at LHW) got hurt and had to sit out UFC 90. No word on who's next for either fighter. #16 Demian Maia will be tested against Nate Quarry at UFC 91. If he beats Quarry, he'll truly have established himself as a title contender.

As for the other promotions, #4 Robbie Lawler may or may not be caught in the EliteXC black hole for the foreseeable future. Unless he's trapped in court for the next two years, he's better off. There was no competition for him there. Now he's got possibilities -- returning to the UFC, going to Japan, Strikeforce or Affliction could all be in his future.

#7 Gegard Mousasi roared into the top 10 after winning the DREAM grand-prix. He's due to fight Vitor Belfort at the next Affliction. That should be a good one. WIsh he was fighting #9 Matt Lindland instead. Lindland will either be fighting perennially ranked LHW Babalu Sobral or Trevor Prangley. Either would be fun but not especially relevant unless Sobral wins and moves to 185 after.

Its too bad Mousasi won't get a shot at DREAM anti-star #12 Yoshihiro Akiyama anytime soon but word is Akiyama is headed to WVR or somewhere else. If he does go to to WVR/Sengoku he'll be in prime position to rematch #10 Kazuo Misaki. Of course that's assuming that Misaki beats the winner of WVR's grand-prix which is no joke with #18 Jorge Santiago, long-time PRIDE LHW star Kazuhiro Nakamura and Shooto champ Siyar Bahadurzada.

That's not even mentioning Misaki's other promotion, Strikeforce. They're quietly putting together a nice little division with #21 Cung Le leading the way. I'm predicting Le will gain at least 5 places on this chart if not 10 before he fights next. If the hype is what I'm expecting, anyway. I'd love to see #11 Frank Trigg against Misaki, or Santiago in Strikeforce or Sengoku. It's too much to hope that Strikeforce would risk the Cung Le franchise against a tough wrestler, but I'd really love to see that -- I actually like Le's chances against Trigg.

Richard has added some very cool charts, including the standings of each fighter in the top 25 against top 10 and top 25 competition. Thanks Richard!

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 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 43 fighters were ranked in the top 25 by one source or another, for reasons of sanity I only track the top 25 (26 due to a tie) 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 sites: WAMMA, Fighters.com, MMA Ratings, Fight Magazine, Total-MMA, Houston Chronicle Brawl Sports, MMA/VT, HDNet/Inside MMA, MMA Playground, FightMatrix, Sherdog, MMA Weekly, TAGG Radio, MMA-ELO, FCFighter, and MMA Fighting.

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.

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