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.
[#6 W125] 
[#5 FW] 
[#16 FW] 
[#6 HW] 
