It’s hard to find good rankings in MMA these days. Most
Rankings come from websites catering to the UFC out of fear they will
lose their press credentials…which is hardly a bias free system. Some
rankings, like those on sherdog, are so bad, it’s just a random
collection of whatever the sherdog staff wants with almost no basis in
reality or what a fighter has actually done to earn a rank.
These types of popularity contests are how you end up with Brock Lesnar (who was 3-1 at the time) becoming the #1 Heavyweight or Matt Serra going from being a Lightweight to passing everyone at Welterweight and becoming #1 there for beating Georges St. Pierre. While beating GSP should count for a lot, it doesn’t make all of the years of hard work for all other Welterweights just disappear. These types of systems are completely worthless and should be ignored.
One very good system (and it is actually a system, not just people’s random baseless opinions being thrown out there) are the ELO Rankings. The ELO Ranking system was created by Arpad Elo and is used by virtually every major sport or game, including: Chess, association football, American college football, basketball, and Major League Baseball. It’s a mathematical system that takes human bias out of the equation altogether. All that matter is what you have actually accomplished, not hype.
You can read more about the ELO System here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELO_ranking
Luckily for MMA fans, there is a website that keeps up with ELO MMA Rankings. The only real problem with this site is it’s one guy running it so sometimes it isn’t updated often enough. Fighters also tend to change weight classes a lot, and if the site isn’t up to date in certain areas, a fighter might be listed in the wrong weight class. None of these problems come from the ELO Ranking system, it’s simply a lack of time from the site manager. He does a great job, it’s just a lot to keep up with.
If you follow MMA, these are the rankings you should use. I haven’t found any other ones that actually matter. http://www.mma-elo.com/
I will be posting ELO MMA Rankings from now on (but I will correct them when a fighter is in the wrong weight class).
These types of popularity contests are how you end up with Brock Lesnar (who was 3-1 at the time) becoming the #1 Heavyweight or Matt Serra going from being a Lightweight to passing everyone at Welterweight and becoming #1 there for beating Georges St. Pierre. While beating GSP should count for a lot, it doesn’t make all of the years of hard work for all other Welterweights just disappear. These types of systems are completely worthless and should be ignored.
One very good system (and it is actually a system, not just people’s random baseless opinions being thrown out there) are the ELO Rankings. The ELO Ranking system was created by Arpad Elo and is used by virtually every major sport or game, including: Chess, association football, American college football, basketball, and Major League Baseball. It’s a mathematical system that takes human bias out of the equation altogether. All that matter is what you have actually accomplished, not hype.
You can read more about the ELO System here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELO_ranking
Luckily for MMA fans, there is a website that keeps up with ELO MMA Rankings. The only real problem with this site is it’s one guy running it so sometimes it isn’t updated often enough. Fighters also tend to change weight classes a lot, and if the site isn’t up to date in certain areas, a fighter might be listed in the wrong weight class. None of these problems come from the ELO Ranking system, it’s simply a lack of time from the site manager. He does a great job, it’s just a lot to keep up with.
If you follow MMA, these are the rankings you should use. I haven’t found any other ones that actually matter. http://www.mma-elo.com/
I will be posting ELO MMA Rankings from now on (but I will correct them when a fighter is in the wrong weight class).
