Lightweight (Ultimate Fighter Tournament Finale)
[#121] Jonathan Brookins  vs. [#102] Michael Johnson

Welterweight
[#45] Stephan Bonnar vs. [#89] Igor Pokrajac

Middleweight
[#47] Kendall Grove vs. [#8]  Demian Maia

Welterweight
[#30] Rick Story vs. [#34]  Johny Hendricks

Featherweight
[#29] Leonard Garcia vs. [#79]  Nam Phan

Lightweight
[#188] Cody McKenzie vs. [NR]  Aaron Wilkinson

Featherweight
[#15 BW] Ian Loveland vs. [#63]  Tyler Toner

Lightweight
[NR] Kyle Watson vs. [NR]  Sako Chivitchian

Bantamweight * Nick Pace was unable to make weight, weighting in at 138 lbs.
[#71] Will Campuzano vs. [NR]  Nick Pace

Featherweight
[NR] Pablo Garza vs. [#56]  Fredson Paixao

Middleweight
[#76] Rich Attonito vs. [#45]  Dave Branch

Light Heavyweight
[#6 MW] Dan Henderson vs. [#13] Renato Sobral

Welterweight
[#11]Paul Daley vs. [#36 MW] Scott Smith

Middleweight
[#12] Robbie Lawler vs. [#46] Matt Lindland

Heavyweight
[#40 LHW] Mike Kyle vs. [#11] Antonio Silva

Light Heavyweight
[*] Benji Radach vs. [#53] Ovince St. Preux

Notable Info (Things Beyond the Top 10)

• Dan Henderson is on the cusp of the Top 10 “Absolute” list.  A win over Babalu should help propel him into #10 within the next few lists, displacing Chuck Liddell.
• Yushin Okami has moved up to #13 on the Middleweight list.  At only 29, it seems likely he will quietly make the Top 10 someday.
• Although it’ll still require a decent amount of work, B.J. Penn is trying to become the 3rd fighter to appear on more than one divisional list, along with Couture and Henderson.  Its still in the distance, but possible.  He has few fights in the division and that is what is holding him back.  A win over Fitch and a charge at the title, could see him challenging for a Top 10 spot in the next couple years.

I’ve seen a great amount of negative feedback from posters on a popular forum about the Welterweight placement of B.J. Penn.  They apparently do not understand, or do not care about how our site rankings work.  Either way, I wanted to explain a few things.

• Our system is a software-based ranking system that has been in existence for nearly three years.  As such, it has been developed to handle the “norms” in MMA and is still evolving.
• When something abnormal happens, we do our best to handle these scenarios programmatically, if there is enough data involved to ascertain an appropriate course of action.  No human intervention is ever taken on a per-bout basis.
• Every time the official ratings are posted, the system analyzes the entire database chronologically, from the very first bout, to the most recent bout.  When a fighter debuts, they start with a rating of 10, and carry one rating throughout their career.
• Current ratings are division-ADJUSTED.  When a fighter moves up a division, their rating is reduced.  The opposite occurs when they move down a division.   This is based on the “norm” and does not account for abnormalities, such as a fighter severely draining themselves and moving down in weight.  A fighter does not start at ground zero at a new division.

Our philosophy is that it is 100% illogical to give a fighter zero credit for moving into a new division and it is also nearly impossible to handle in a software system.  In the case of B.J. Penn, how can you not give him SOME credit at Welterweight before fighting Matt Hughes, even with the “traditional” divisional ladder-based ranking philosophy?  Although much time has passed, Penn holds an arguable loss to GSP, and a prior win over Matt Hughes — two of the greatest Welterweights in history in their primes.  Not to mention, he is/was still a top ranked Lightweight, only one division below Welterweight.

To make a long story short, Penn, who was ranked #3 at Lightweight, would have been ranked #8 at Welterweight based on his pre-bout point total.  He beat #7 Welterweight Matt Hughes in the first round, thus creating the eventual movement which placed Penn at #4, and Hughes at #12.

Light Heavyweight
[#3] Lyoto Machida vs. [#4] Quinton Jackson

Welterweight
[#7] Matt Hughes vs. [#3 LW] B.J. Penn

Middleweight
[#34] Gerald Harris vs. [#70 HW] Maiquel Falcao

Light Heavyweight
[#27] Phil Davis vs. [#43] Tim Boestch

Lightweight
[#9] George Sotiropoulos vs. [#55] Joe Lauzon

Middleweight
[#33] Mark Munoz vs. [#52] Aaron Simpson

Welterweight
[#44] Brian Foster vs. [#86] Matt Brown

Welterweight
[#47] Dennis Hallman vs. [#62] Karo Parisyan

Lightweight
[#201] Edson Barboza vs. [#203] Mike Lullo

Lightweight
[#97] T.J. O’Brien vs. [#116] Paul Kelly

Lightweight
[#32] Tyson Griffin vs. [#45] Nik Lentz

Notable Info

• Along with the usual update, we did some historical data corrections and updates.  This will cause fluctuations throughout the ratings.

Bantamweight
[#9 FW] Urijah Faber vs. [#10] Takeya Mizugaki

Featherweight
[#11] Chad Mendes vs. [#31] Javier Vazquez

Featherweight
[#25] Erik Koch vs. [*] Francisco Rivera

Bantamweight
[#2] Joseph Benavidez vs. [#6] Wagnney Fabiano

Bantamweight
[#60] Demetrious Johnson vs. [#34] Damacio Page

Notable Info (Things beyond the Top 10)

• Cain Velazquez enters the Top 25 Heavyweights after taking the UFC title away from Brock Lesnar.
• Hector Lombard finally gets a quality win which pushes him up 29 spots into the 74th position at Middleweight.
• Gilbert Melendez is now one spot from the Top 10.  Frankie Edgar is right on his heels a few positions behind, but rising very quickly.
• Include Masakazu Imanari in the list of fighters who may soon displace some of the ancient Japanese names on the top Bantamweight list.  He just rose to #11 with this update.
• Zoila Frausto jumps from #79 to #39 on the All-Time Women list with her recent win over Megumi Fujii.  If she can hold her standing, she will climb the list rapidly, as it is incredibly weak beyond the Top 20.

Update: We are re-posting the MMA rankings as we got some late results in.  Most notably, Paulo Filho’s loss in Brazil.

There have been sixty UFC cards with at least 10 fights.  When you eliminate the cards that have at least one unranked fighter (by our accounts), you drop that list all the way down to nine cards [89,92,96,102,108,111,FN21,114,116].

Out of these nine, five had at least one fighter ranked #200 or worse.

This leaves four cards:

UFC 92 (10 fights / 2 title fights)
UFC 102 (11 fights / 0 title fights)
UFC 108 (10 fights / 0 title fights)
UFC 116 (11 fights / 1 title fight)

UFC 121 (11 fights / 1 title fight) will join this unique list.

* Rankings approximations were made for all cards, since we only started officially ranking fighters in 2008.  This however, is accurate enough for this analysis.