Neal's Fight Island MMA rankings

Neal provides his rankings for March 2023

Fight Island is going to maintain rankings.

We’re not yet certain how they’ll look in the end, but we’ve agreed in principle on a few points.

1)      They’ll be an aggregate format with contributors each producing their own list.

2)      Contributors will use their own explicit ranking criteria.

3)      We will share eligibility criteria. For now these are those criteria:

a.       Fighter has made weight in the division in the last 12 months.

b.      If fighter has a fight booked when those 12 months elapse they will not be removed from eligibility.

c.       Fighters will be classified by actual weight on the scale, division names and other promotional eligibility criteria notwithstanding.

4)      These rankings will occasionally be accompanied by discussion articles.

5)      We’re not going to waste effort on pound-for-pound discussion, because it’s made up, meaningless, and arbitrary.

This is the first of those discussion articles: I will share my initial world MMA rankings as of UFC 285 and Bellator 291, and I will discuss the criteria I used to get there.

First: the numbers. Take the time to find something that you disagree with. Discussion to follow.

Men’s Rankings

125 Lbs.

1. Brandon Moreno

2. Deiveson Figueiredo

3. Alexandre Pantoja

4. Kai Kara-France

5. Brandon Royval

6. Matheus Nicolau

7. Manel Kape

8. Amir Albazi

9. Alex Perez

10. Muhammad Mokaev

135 Lbs.

1. Aljamain Sterling

2. Merab Dvalishvili

3. Marlon Vera

4. Sean O'Malley

5. Petr Yan

6. Cory Sandhagen

7. Patchy Mix

8. Ricky Simon

9. Demetrious Johnson

10. Raufeon Stotts

11. Kyoji Horiguchi

12. Pedro Munhoz

13. Magomed Magomedov

14. Adriano Moraes

145 Lbs.

1. Alexander Volkanovski

2. Max Holloway

3. Yair Rodriguez

4. Arnold Allen

5. Ilia Topuria

6. Movsar Evloev

7. Patricio Pitbull

8. Fabricio Andrade

9. Brian Ortega

10. Josh Emmett

11. Calvin Kattar

12. Bryce Mitchell

13. Jung Chang-sung

14. Shane Burgos

155 Lbs.

1. Islam Makhachev

2. Charles Oliviera

3. Beneil Dariush

4. Rafael Fiziev

5. Dustin Poirier

6. Justin Gaethje

7. Usman Nurmagomedov

8. Michael Chandler

9. Mateusz Gamrot

10. Arman Tsarukyan

11. Jailin Turner

12. Mansour Barnaoui

13. Brett Primus

170 Lbs.

1. Leon Edwards

2. Kamaru Usman

3. Khamzat Chimaev

4. Gilbert Burns

5. Shavkat Rakhmonov

6. Yaroslav Amosov

7. Belal Muhammad

8. Jack Della Maddalena

9. Logan Storely

10. Steven Thompson

11. Christian Lee

12. Geoff Neal

13. Sean Brady

14. Vicente Luque

15. Jason Jackson

185 Lbs.

1. Alex Pereira

2. Israel Adesanya

3. Robert Whittaker

4. Johnny Eblen

5. Jared Cannonier

6. Roman Dolidze

7. Dricus du Plessis

8. Brendan Allen

9. Derek Brunson

10. Jack Hermansson

11. Sean Strickland

205 Lbs.

1. Jiri Prochazka

2. Jan Blachowicz

3. Magomed Ankalaev

4. Jamahal Hill

5. Vadim Nemkov

6. Corey Anderson

7. Johnny Walker

8. Phil Davis

9. Nikita Krylov

10. Ryan Spann

Heavyweight

1. Francis Ngannou

2. Curtis Blaydes

3. Jon Jones

4. Sergei Pavlovich

5. Ciryl Gane

6. Tom Aspinall

7. Sergey Spivak

8. Alexander Volkov

9. Marcin Tybura

10. Jarzinho Rozenstruik

11. Jailton Almeida

12. Alexander Romanov

13. Ryan Bader

14. Linton Vassell

Women’s Rankings

Note that the two premiere Atomweight divisions – RIZIN and Invicta – use 108lb and 105lb as the cutoffs respectively. Due to a shortage of notable fighters to populate the list, I have combined these as a -108 division.

108 Lbs.

1. Seika Izawa

2. Jillian DeCoursey

3. Jessica Delboni

4. Si Woo Park

5. Ayaka Hamasaki

115 Lbs.

1. Zhang Weili

2. Amanda Lemos

3. Marina Rodriguez

4. Carla Esparza

5. Rose Namajunas

6. Yan Xiaonan

7. Mackenzie Dern

8. Virna Jandiroba

9. Angela Lee

10. Stamp Fairtex

11. Angela Hill

12. Tabitha Ricci

125 Lbs.

1. Alexa Grasso

2. Erin Blanchfield

3. Valentina Shevchenko

4. Taila Santos

5. Manon Fiorot

6. Jessica Andrade

7. Xiong Jing Nan

8. Kaitlyn Chookagian

9. Casey O'Neill

10. Jennifer Maia

11. Lauren Murphy

12. Liz Carmouche

13. Maycee Barber

14. Miranda Maverick

15. Amanda Ribas

135 Lbs.

1. Amanda Nunes

2. Juliana Pena

3. Raquel Pennington

4. Irene Aldana

5. Holly Holm

6. Mayra Bueno Silva

7. Ketlyn Vieira

8. Pannie Kianzad

9. Sara McMann

10. Karol Rosa

The first thing you will probably notice is that I don’t yet have a full top-15 for all divisions. This will take time as it turns out that making a comprehensive ranking is hard, especially if you care about what you’re saying. After a certain point the division can become white noise. There are more than 10 light heavyweight fighters in the world, granted, but those fighters who are not as good as Ryan Spann seem like an amorphous blob right now. More fighters will fill those holes as fighters distinguish themselves.

And now here’s how I arrived at these numbers.

Criterion #1 Descriptive rankings

When I rank fighters, I do so by past, observable performances. This seems obvious, but if you pay attention to the way that MMA fans discuss the concept of rankings, you’ll notice that much commentary depends on a predictive view of the sport and hypothetical matchups – i.e. “fighter A should be ranked above fighter B because I think A would win.” Similarly, the actual win or loss on the record is what we can observe. I may disagree with a decision or result, but in the end the sport of MMA is about achieving wins within given competitive framework, which includes convincing shitty judges to award rounds. I can not rank based on counterfactuals such as “had Chris Lee not been cageside...”

Criterion #2 Wins push fighters up; losses push them down

Winning fighters go higher in the rankings. Under no circumstance will a fighter ever be ranked above an opponent who beat them in the last outing. This is why Valentina Shevchenko is above Taila Santos today, and why Alexa Grasso is above Valentina Shevchenko. In my mind, no fighter coming off of a loss to anyone other than the champ should be top 5, no fighter with two consecutive losses should be top 10, and no fighter with three consecutive losses should be ranked at all. (I’m sorry, Derrick.) This won’t be a hard rule, (see Petr Yan at #5) but this can explain many heterodox decisions.

Criterion #3 Consistency matters

A fighter who has alternated wins and losses against top-5 competition will be ranked below a fighter who has a streak with wins against fighters 6-10. When making decisions about how far to push a fighter in a loss, I will often look to their last win against a currently ranked fighter. I genuinely think of this as the Michael Chandler rule – his last win against a fighter who I now have ranked was in 2018. Even though he’s a main event fighter, he’s not a winning one, so he falls below consistent winning fighters like Dariush and Fiziev.

Factors not on this list – such as who holds a given belt or lineal championship – are secondary. Readers are welcome to disagree with my rankings, but if you choose to do so, please consider my rankings in the light of these three criteria. I’m not interested in other people’s gut feelings as my own are hard enough to sort out.

Qualitative tiebreakers

Once wins and consistency are satisfied, I weigh factors like dominance of wins, opponents’ performances, performances in other divisions, and general MMA Math. There will be times where I make a call based on the fighter’s attributes that I saw in the cage on a given night. I had Amosov ranked at 5 before UFC 285, but Shavkat (previously at 6) showed ability to overcome opposition and thus switched spots, even though there was no movement in their relative records or shared opponents. It was a call; I made it. There will be times where a fighter who I like gets preference in these tiebreaker moments (Merab Dvalishvilli and Patchy Mix, perhaps?).

There it is: the first Fightis.land World MMA Ranking post. Remember, this is merely the first post in a series which will aggregate multiple lists in a format to be determined.

More to come.