Commentary by Kid Nate (with a few small edits by Richard): We opted to skip the December Meta-Rankings because all the sites pretty much waited until after the big events UFC on December 27th, Dynamite! on the 31st and some even waited for Sengoku on January 4th.

Obviously the big news was #2 Shinya Aoki submitting #3 Eddie Alvarez on New Year’s Eve. Had Aoki not lost to alternate #5 Joachim Hansen at the DREAM tourney finals, he’d have a strong case to be considered the best in the world. As is, the situation in Japan is cloudy as ever. Hansen was supposed to fight #5 Gesias “JZ” Cavalcante on the same card but had to drop out of the fight with a concussion.

That wraps up a hard luck year for JZ. He started the year as a consensus #2 or #3 but after a no contest followed by a loss to Aoki, he was out with an injured knee for most of the year. Hansen’s injury canceled what might have been his redemption fight for 2008.

Alvarez is jumping right back on the horse with a match against UFC washout Naoyuki Kotani at Extreme Challenge in New Jersey on January 23rd. He’ll also be fighting in the Bellator tournament on ESPN Deportes in April. Interesting how Monte Cox can keep his fighters busy and outside the UFC.

#1 B. J. Penn will obviously be moving up to welterweight to fight #1 meta-ranked Georges St. Pierre at UFC 94 on January 31. That leaves #7 Kenny Florian waiting for his title shot. #6 Sean Sherk wanted to welcome #6 meta-ranked welterweight Diego Sanchez to the division, but Sanchez will face #15 Joe Stevenson at UFC 95.

The other big fight since the last rankings was #14 Satoru Kitaoka’s submission over #8 Takanori Gomi at Sengoku 7.  The impact of that fight is only beginning to be felt on the meta-rankings, most of the sites updated before the 1/4 event.

NOTE: The Meta-Rankings are not the subjective opinion of the BloodyElbow team, but rather a compilation of the rankings of over twenty leading MMA web sites. It is our opinion that these are the most informative MMA rankings anywhere.

Based on the premise that opinions are like assholes, everybody has one and they all stink, instead of putting up our own subjective fighter rankings, we compile and average the rankings of every source we could find online.

The goal is to show how the MMA community rates the fighters, not to bore you with our opinions.

Be sure and look at the points, they’re a much more telling number than the ranking. There’s clearly a huge gulf between the top 9 fighters and those that follow.

A total of 45 fighters were ranked in the top 25 by one source or another. For reasons of sanity I only track the top 25 most highly rated fighters.

25 points are awarded for a first place ranking, 16 for a 10th place ranking, 1 for a 25th place ranking. A formula is used to “normalize” the data so all fighters are awarded points from those lists that do not include a full 25 fighters. Each site consulted awards a total of 325 points. Fuller explanation below.

Rankings were compiled from the following sites: 411 Mania (12/4), Brawl Sports (10/15), Cage Potato (11/5), Fight Matrix (12/31), Fight Magazine, Fighters, Five Ounces of Pain (12/31), Full Contact Fighter, Inside Fighting, Inside MMA, MMA 4 Real (12/29), MMA Blog, MMA Fighting (12/9), MMA News (11/10), MMA on Tap (11/11), MMA Playground (1/1), MMA Ratings, MMA Rocks (12/6), MMA Torch (12/15), MMA Weekly (12/31), MMA VT, MMA ELO (12/10), Sherdog (12/30), TAGG Radio, The MMA Equation (12/8), Total MMA, WAMMA (12/31), Wrestling Observer (10/30).

The normalization scheme as explained by JCS of FightMatrix  is here:

The “normalization number” (new name) would be:

120
divided by
(Total Fighters Found in Any List minus 10)

Every fighter found somewhere else, but on a Top 10 list would be assigned this number.

The “normalization” number would not apply to a fighter not found on a Top 25 list. They would simply get 0.

So the process would be:

Do all of the Top 25 lists first, #1 = 25, #2 = 24…. #24 = 2, #25 = 1
Do all of the Top 10 lists, same scoring structure.. stops at #10 = 16

Figure out that normalization variable.

Fill in the normalization variable to all fighters not found in the Top 10 lists, but found elsewhere.

Do your totals and rank.