Once again, apologies for the delay on this. Moving and holidays ruined my November.

The biggest change to the middleweight meta-rankings in November was the overdue fall of #7 Paulo Filho. His mind-bogglingly bad performance at his last WEC fight sent him plummeting from #2. I expect him to do a Ricardo Arona and slowly fade in the rankings as people realize he’s not going to be fighting anywhere again soon.

#2 Dan Henderson seems to owe his rise from #5 to people’s needs to have a well-known fighter at the second spot. Henderson will be taking on #8 Rich Franklin at UFC 93 in a 205lb match. The UFC’s decision to push Franklin into the Light Heavyweight division seems stranger by the day as rumors mount daily of Anderson Silva’s imminent retirement and/or a series of interdivisional superfights against GSP, Chuck Liddell and who knows who. If Franklin beats Henderson and Silva leaves the division, I expect to see Rich cut back down to 185 to reclaim his belt.

#3 Yushin Okami is still suffering from his low-profile, no thanks to the UFC who are relegating his upcoming bout with #36 Dean Lister to the undercard. I really wonder if Okami will ever get his title shot. #5 Nathan Marquardt continues to rise off the impact of crushing #20 Martin Kampmann at UFC 88. Kampmann remains ranked at middleweight by some although he’s moving down to welterweight at UFC 93.

The UFC’s BJJ standout #13 Demian Maia continues to rise, I expect to see him in contention through 2009 and maybe fight for the title in 2010.  Maia’s rise has the UFC’s other BJJ ace, #14 Thales Leites calling him out. Now that’s a fight I’d like to see. Leites is already feeling slighted by the surge in Nate Marquardt’s stock, owning as he does a victory over “the Great”, however tainted.

The rest of the UFC’s pool in this division features three fighters on the rise — #16 Michael Bisping (who will be rushed into title contention),  #23 Denis Kang (who will debut against Alan Belcher at UFC 93), and #25 Dan Miller. #18 Patrick Cote is injured and out of favor with the fans after his weak title challenge and journeyman #24 Jason MacDonald will be gatekeeping against former light heavyweight Wilson Gouveia at the TUF 8 finale.

On the DREAM side of things, #6 Gegard Mousasi will be fighting on New Year’s Eve at K-1, but alas, not in an MMA match. Maybe I’m too anal retentive, but I hate to see a top contender wasting his time screwing around in goofy matches. I really don’t think the Japanese take MMA seriously as a sport, but thank goodness they excel at making it a wonderful spectacle.

#9 Matt Lindland will be fighting #27 Vitor Belfort at the January 24 Affliction show, if that fight card is actually held. I’m certainly crossing my fingers that those idiots can pull off one more card even if the arena is empty, I’ll be watching. And Lindland vs Belfort is a relevant matchup I’ll be eager to see. I don’t think Lindland has the power edge over Belfort that his buddy Randy Couture enjoyed so it should be an entertaining match.

Rumors continue to swirl that Strikeforce is in discussions with NBC to air live fights in primetime — and now they’re rumored to be in talks with CBS as well. Either way, surely a network TV opportunity could bring #22 Cung Le out of his Hollywood career long enough for a return match or two. Maybe even against #17 Jorge Santiago or #10 Kazuo Misaki.

Richard has added some very cool charts. that can be found in the full entry. Thanks Richard!

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 (26 due to a tie) 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 the following sites: MMA Weekly, Sherdog, HDNet/Inside MMA, Total MMA, Fight Magazine,  411 Mania, CagePotato, TAGG Radio, FCFighter, MMA ELO, Five Ounces of Pain, FightMatrix, MMA Playground,  MMA News, Inside Fighting, MMA on Tap, MMA Torch, MMA Blogger, MMA 4 Real, MMA EQ, WAMMA, MMA Ratings, MMA/VT (Japan), MMA Fighting and Houston Chronicle Brawl Sports.

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.