Most Noteworthy Match of the Year:
Michael Bisping KO(1) Luke Rockhold
The “most noteworthy” match of the year isn’t about box office or the popular scene, instead it is a pretty basic calculation — a sum of quality if you will. Luke Rockhold finds himself in the most noteworthy match for the second straight year, but this time on the losing end. This is also the 4th straight winner in the Middleweight division, which speaks largely of its depth at the elite level.
As a refresher, our “Comeback” award is about coming back from inactivity or major injury (that we know about) and in doing so, really impressing. You can see more details at the bottom of the post about specific qualifiers.
Comeback Fighter of the Year: Dominick Cruz
Yet another ACL tear cost Cruz over 15 months away from the sport, but he returned to take the championship by defeating Dillashaw in January. Although Cruz lost the title to Garbrandt at the very end of 2016, it’s hard to argue a better candidate for this award.
Honorable Mention: Khabib Nurmagomedov
Unleash your ninja skills with fighting games, which can really show people that they’re capable of more than they thought. Ninjas have been popular in the media for a long time, and they have a degree of more or less permanent popularity on the Internet. Lots of people want to be able to really get ahead with these sorts of fighting skills, even if they’re never going to use them in real life.
Fighting games aren’t really going to be able to prepare people for fighting in the real world, although lots of people think that this is going to be the case. Being able to unleash your ninja skills after playing a single game can really be an appealing prospect for a lot of people. However, it’s important to keep all of these games in perspective. Video games and games at websites like the Royal Vegas Online Casino can certainly help with a lot of very real physical skills. They can improve a person’s hand-eye coordination. They can also generally give people better spatial recognition abilities.
Hockey is quite popular among people who are interested in betting on sports, so it is not a secret that hockey fans make up a big part of traffic for sports books sites. As a result, there are plenty of opportunities to place bets on this sport. Some websites offer wagers not only on the major league games but also the minor ones. There are many ways of placing online bets on hockey, and such diversity gives an opportunity to compare all of them and choose the most beneficial one. Since it is hard for amateurs to understand all the differences between the different bet types, we offer a small guide for that below.
If you place a bet of this type, you are guessing which team will win the game. This is an extremely simple type of betting, which requires intuition rather than profound knowledge. You can bet either on positive or negative lines at bet-uk.com.
This type of bets is quite similar to money line betting; the only difference is there is an opportunity to win more if you bet on favorite. If you place a bet on the favorite, you need them to win with the difference in score of two or more points; but bet on an underdog will be a winning one if your team loses by one point. Puck Line betting is risky because teams can play to a draw.
This past weekend Rizin Fighting Federation hosted their fourth event. The card featured several ranked fighters, and the results have made an impact on the Fight Matrix rankings. The following is a breakdown of some of the changes in the rankings after the event.
Rankings Return
Mirko “Cro Cop” Filipovic returned to the heavyweight rankings following his first round submission over Hyun Man Myung. He is now the #31 heavyweight. Myung was unranked headed into the event, but since “Cro Cop” had been dropped from the rankings due to inactivity a simple win was enough to put him back in the top 50.
Rankings Debut
Three fighters, Kron Gracie, Amir Aliakbari and Kanako Murata, made their rankings debut following the event.
Gracie defeated veteran Hideo Tokoro in the main event and now finds himself as the #293 featherweight.
Former two-time world champion Greco-Roman wrestler Amir Aliakbari easily dispatched the former #89 heavyweight Joao Almeida and makes his rankings debut at #116.
Finally, junior world champion wrestler Kanako Murata bested the former #7 atomweight Kyra Batara in order to debut at #39 strawweight.
Moving Up
On a weekend that included plenty of talk about the dearth of challengers for Cris “Cyborg” Justino‘s throne, there was another example in Japan. After going 3-0 against opponents with a combined 2-0 previous record, Gabi Garcia finds herself ranked #9 in the featherweight and over division. She jumped up five spots after defeating Destanie Yarbrough in the card’s opening bout.
Valentin Moldavsky defeated the former #54 heavyweight and moved up 129 spots in the rankings. He is now the #88 heavyweight.
Szymon Bajor went from #125 to #87 heavyweight following his victory over Teodoras Aukstuolis. The Lithuanian fighter had been ranked as the #105 heavyweight.
Dropped Out
Batara actually manged to drop from a top-10 spot to unranked. There are a few factors at play. First, her previous #7 ranking at atomweight was at least partially due to a lack of talent at 105 pounds. For this fight, she bumped up to strawweight and took the loss. So, not only did she lose, but she also reclassified at a much deeper weightclass. If she returns to Combate Americas and wins another atomweight fight, she will most likely return to the top 10.
Richard Mann currently runs the data-driven MMA blog StrikeScoreMMA.com
Fight Matrix updates the Current MMA Rankings once a week. As the deepest and most inclusive ranking system in the sport, fights all over the globe can have a major impact on the rankings. Let’s take a look at the biggest risers in the divisional rankings. The number in parenthesis is the number of spots that the fighter moved up from the last issued rankings. For the purpose of this article, fighters who were unranked in the previous ranking iteration are excluded.
Heavyweight
Christian Colombo #123 (52)
Denmark’s Colombo moved up 52 spots after fighting to a draw with Jarjis Danho in his UFC debut. He is now undefeated in seven-straight bouts since falling to current UFC fighter Viktor Pesta in 2012.
Middleweight
Mauricio Alonso #152 (97)
Alonso last fought in the main event of Dragon House 23. There, he scored a unanimous-decision victory over Justin Baseman. The Brazilian fighter holds a 12-7 record as a professional. In his only really big show experience, he fell to Nick Pica on the undercard of Bellator 142 – Dynamite last September.
Welterweight
Ismail Naurdiev #273 (285)
Austrian fighter Naurdiev is now riding a six-fight winning streak after defeating Daniel Skibinski at World Free Fight Challenge 20 on Aug. 27. The 20-year-old fighter trains with Thaiboxing MMA Salzburg.
Keep Reading
Sherdog recently released a list of their Top 10 Canadian MMA Fighters of All-Time
Let’s compare…
Sherdog Top 10
FightMatrix fighters missing from Sherdog list: Carvalho, Doerksen (HM), Davis (HM), Loiseau (HM)
FightMatrix Top 10 (Absolute All-Time Rating)
Sherdog fighters missing from our list: Grant (#11), Goodridge (#13), Cote (#15), Stout (#16)
Fight Matrix updates the Current MMA Rankings once a week. As the deepest and most inclusive ranking system in the sport, fights all over the globe can have a major impact on the rankings. Let’s take a look at the biggest risers in the divisional rankings. The number in parenthesis is the number of spots that the fighter moved up from the last issued rankings. For the purpose of this article, fighters who were unranked in the previous ranking iteration are excluded.
Heavyweight
Igor Sliusarchuk #159 (36)
It looks like the correction in the rankings system has rewarded Sliusarchuk with a 36 spot bump. The Ukrainian fighter last fought on Dec. 19 when he scored a 45-second knockout over Emil Zahariev. The 27-year-old fighter holds a 19-8 record as a professional.
Middleweight
Alessio Di Chirico #124 (94)
Di Chirico has quickly risen up the rankings. At UFC on Fox 21, he scored his first UFC victory over Garreth McLellan via split decision. The win improved his record to 10-1. Despite beginning his professional career in 2011, he was allowed to the 2014 IMMAF amateur world championships where he took first place.
Other Notables: Ken Hasegawa #59 (34)
Welterweight
Vuyisile Colossa #284 (134)
The One Championship veteran got back on the winning track with a third-round knockout victory over Marcelo Tenorio under the IMPI World Series Banner. Prior to that, he had lost to Elnur Agaev for Kunlun Fight in his only other bout of 2016. The South African kickboxer fought on the very first One Championship card and holds a 3-1 record in the promotion.
Keep Reading
Brock Lesnar tested positive for a banned substance by USADA right before his fight at UFC 200.
It appears obvious that Lesnar knew exactly what he was doing. He did not test positive in any of the tests that the results of which came back long enough before the fight for the fight to get canceled, in which case he wouldn’t have gotten the money for the fight. Instead, he took the banned substances for which he tested positive only when he knew that the results of the tests would come back after the fight, fought and got the money for the fight.
The question is, what should be done in order for that not to happen again in the future.
The situation now is that fighters who test positive for banned substances get suspended from fighting. This is, of course, a good solution for most fighters, for whom fighting is their main career. By suspending them from fighting, they don’t get to pursue their goal of an MMA career (at least for a while); they don’t get the opportunity to continue being involved in competition and their livelihood is taken away from them for a period of time.
But for some fighters, an MMA career is not their goal anyway. They are in for one big payday. It happened before (James Toney), and it has never been more clear than this time with Brock Lesnar.
