When it comes to the fight game, everyone’s an Aristotle. Fight fans love rankings. They downright need rankings. Who reading this site doesn’t have, in their own mind, the perfectly just and true list of the top welterweights in the world, neatly and indisputably ordered one through ten? Heavyweights, middleweights, lightweights — we’ve got it all figured out, and with the newly prominent WEC, featherweight and bantamweight rankings will no longer be the preserve of only the Shooto and DEEP enthusiasts among us. Of course, my top-ten lists bear only passing resemblance to yours (what do you mean Carlos Newton isn’t a top-ten whatever-he’s-fighting-at-now-weight?), and conversations turn into friendly arguments, and then maybe not-so-friendly arguments, until one or both of us walk away convinced that the other has no idea what they’re talking about. That’s what rankings do, and that’s why we love them.

In the last week, two major MMA media outlets, Sherdog and Yahoo!, have released their first pound-for-pound rankings of 2008, and, naturally, I’ve got problems with them. And you’ve got problems with them. It’s inconceivable that any two fight fans would see eye to eye on matters of this magnitude: non-binding, utterly inconsequential lists of who would be the best fighter if everybody was the same size are serious business. But what interests me most about these rankings isn’t whether or not Yahoo! is right to have BJ Penn at number seven (they’re not) or if Sherdog’s inclusion of Shinya Aoki in their top ten is, at this point, premature (it might be). What’s most striking is what’s happening with Fedor.

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Here is how the Sherdog team sees the top ten pound-for-pound mixed martial artists as of 9 January 2008:

1. Anderson Silva (20-4)
2. Quinton Jackson (29-6)
3. Fedor Emelianenko (27-1, 1 NC)
4. Georges St. Pierre (15-2)
5. Dan Henderson (22-6)
6. Takanori Gomi (27-3, 1 no-decision)
7. Shinya Aoki (12-2)
8. Urijah Faber (20-1)
9. Norifumi Yamamoto (17-1, 1 NC)
10. Randy Couture (16-8)

And Yahoo!, as of 4 January 2008:

1. Anderson Silva (20-4)
2. Georges St. Pierre (15-2)
3. Quinton Jackson (29-6)
4. Fedor Emelianenko (27-1, 1 NC)
5. Randy Couture (16-8)
6. Dan Henderson (22-6)
7. B.J. Penn (11-4-1)
8. Urijah Faber (20-1)
9. Antonio Rodrigo Nogueira (30-4-1)
10. Mauricio Rua (16-3)

Not long ago seen as the consensus (or close to it) number one fighter in the world, Fedor Emelianenko slipped from that position in 2007, a year that saw him compete only against a game but overmatched top middleweight in Matt Lindland and a grossly inexperienced giant in Hong Man Choi. Yahoo! had Fedor ranked first as recently as late November, while Sherdog had Anderson Silva overtaking Fedor for the number one position in October. And fair enough: if Fedor is no longer competing against top fighters in his own weight class, it’s only right that athletes testing themselves and succeeding against the best their respective divisions have to offer be ranked above him. Anderson Silva’s run through the UFC’s middleweight division is hard to ignore, even though it might seem odd to argue that the king of one of the sport’s weaker divisions is the best pound-for-pound fighter in the world. Quinton Jackson, who both Sherdog and Yahoo! now rank above Fedor, is similarly deserving. If defeating Chuck Liddell and Dan Henderson back-to-back, unifying the Pride and UFC 205lbs titles along the way doesn’t put you at or near the top of the pound-for-pound heap, what does? The Yahoo! poll’s number two spot for GSP might not sit quite as well, given his (admittedly soon-to-be-avenged) freak loss to Matt Serra, but two dominant wins over Matt Hughes clearly outweigh that loss in the minds of many. This is all debatable, naturally, and that’s the whole point.

It’s not Fedor fall from the top spot that is particularly striking about these new rankings. Indeed, if the reason he’s falling is inactivity, or more precisely a lack of meaningful activity, it might make sense to exclude him from consideration altogether until such time as that changes. No, what’s remarkable isn’t Fedor’s ranking; it’s the language accompanying and surrounding it.

Yahoo! originally ran their new rankings under the headline “Fedor’s Folly.” “The last days of 2007,” Doyle begins, “just may go down as the time in which Fedor Emelianenko’s reputation was sealed.” This reputation, Doyle makes clear, is that of a coward. On the UFC’s December 29th show, “[n]either Chuck Liddell nor Wanderlei Silva backed down from the challenge of facing each other,” and “Matt Hughes wasn’t afraid to accept Georges St. Pierre as a replacement in an interim welterweight title match.” Nor was GSP “afraid to take the fight on short notice.” In contrast to those heroics, Doyle writes, “Emelianenko, the guy long considered the top fighter in the world, fought someone named Hong Man-Choi in Saitama, Japan.” While Liddell, Silva, and St. Pierre are fearless, Fedor is, by contrast, afraid, and “sullies his reputation by fighting cream puffs.” Luckily for us, this cowardice hasn’t gone unnoticed or unpunished: “the voters have responded.”

It’s not the first time Doyle has taken a strangely outraged tone regarding Fedor: in the November Yahoo! rankings, released at a time when the Choi fight was unconfirmed but heavily rumoured, Doyle wrote, “No word on whether the world’s paper championship will officially be on the line in this one.” Figure that one out.

Or this one: in their new rankings, Sherdog suggest that “The 31-year-old Russian heavyweight king must get back to fighting competitive bouts, otherwise he could squander all that he worked for over the years.”

Whose folly is this supposed to be, again?

What is it, exactly, that Fedor Emelianenko has “worked for over the years” that is in danger of being “squandered” here? The financial security? The freedom to work where and when and with whom he pleases, on terms that suit his interests and those of his management and team? The near universal praise of his peers? The meetings with heads of state? The tender embrace of Jean Claude Van Damme? Pretty clearly, none of that is in any immediate jeopardy. The only thing in jeopardy, it seems, is Fedor’s reputation among journalists who show a pretty lousy understanding of what this business is. I think it would surprise Emiliankenko to learn that that is “all that he worked for over the years.”

As fans, we want to see the best fighters fight the best fighters. As thinking adults, we realize that there are unfortunate but legitimate reasons why that doesn’t always happen, and we realize that those reasons stem from differing financial interests more often than from the kind of cowardice Doyle implies. We also realize that of the varied reasons fighters fight, taking top spot on anyone’s inconsequential pound-for-pound ranking — yours, mine, Yahoo!’s or Sherdog’s — is probably pretty low down the list. If fighters make lists, too.