Who doesn’t love a good rankings debate?
Be it debating the best ’80s Schwarzenegger movie — “Predator” — or whether Kobe Bryant was a top-10 all-timer in the NBA — he was — we’ve all got thoughts on how to order a list of things, people, places, whatever.
Rankings are intrinsic to professional combat sports, and MMA sits neatly under that umbrella. The tricky part is finding a set of rankings to which one subscribes that makes real sense.
The UFC rankings are a mess. Generated at present by 20 media outlets, mostly obscure and far removed from general MMA discourse both on-site at events and online, they frequently feel out of step with reality to some degree. (Full disclosure: I was, for years, a member of this panel when it had once included roughly 100 voters and included more notable media members.) The rankings themselves also apply only to the UFC’s roster, with fighters removed for random reasons from time to time.