Why bother doing MMA rankings?
Because they’re fun. And because I seem to have a different take on them than most.
A large part of the allure of combat sports, and MMA in particular, lies in (ostensibly) determining who is the best, and how the hierarchy below the top competitor shakes out. The task of ranking, then, is to foist this structure, which is really fairly artificial, onto the chaos of the real sport. This process is fraught with inevitable subjectivity, which is enough for some people to deny that rankings have any real meaning or purpose.
But many fans, myself included, still feel compelled to make sense of the world of MMA through ranked lists of fighters. My feeling is that what these rankings require are a clear set of transparent guidelines, not to remove subjectivity, but to minimize it where possible, and to make clear where and how it intrudes. For some reason, major MMA sites that do rankings, like sherdog.com, seem to lack this sort of structure. Others, like the Independent World MMA Rankings, have one but appear to enforce it only selectively.
This site is my experiment with a particular set of rules. It’s a perpetual work in progress, so feel free to comment and share your views about what I’m doing wrong.
