Commentary by Kid Nate: You might think that the buzz would be huge heading into Affliction’s January 24th show since the headlining fight is matching up #1 Fedor Emelianenko with #2 Andrei Arlovski. But no, people can’t even be bothered to care it seems. Honestly I’m feeling more suspense about whether the fight will happen at all than about who will win.

On the same card #3 Josh Barnett is scheduled to fight the entirely unranked Gilbert Yvel — provided Yvel can get a license to fight in California. I’ll be glad to see Barnett in the ring, but honestly Sengoku could’ve gotten him a better opponent — like #18 Antonio Silva.

Part of Affliction’s problem is that the UFC has done a great job of creating a sense of legitimacy around their two heavyweight belt-holders #5 Frank Mir and #6 Brock Lesnar. Their wins over #4 Antonio Rodrigo Nogueira and #7 Randy Couture shocked a lot of people and honestly I think many people consider Lesnar the most dangerous heavyweight around right now, even if people are reluctant to rank a 3-1 fighter at the top.

#10 Alistair Overeem continues to build buzz, even his K-1 rules fight on NYE seems to have juiced his standing in the MMA world. KTFO’ing the world’s best kick boxer will do that for a fighter. Rumors about Overeem talking to the UFC have been swirling.

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.

A total of 39 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. Fuller explanation below.

Rankings were compiled from 23 following sites: 411 Mania (1/6), Brawl Sports (1/6), Cage Potato (1/1), Fight Matrix (1/4), Fight! Magazine, Five Ounces of Pain (1/4), Full Contact Fighter, Inside Fighting, Inside MMA, MMA 4 Real (1/7), MMA Blog, MMA ELO (1/5), MMA Fighting (1/4), MMA Playground (1/10), MMA Rocks (1/4), MMA Torch (11/17), MMA Weekly (1/7), MMA/VT, Sherdog (1/7), Sports Illustrated (1/6), TAGG Radio, Total MMA (1/4), WAMMA (12/17).

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.