Who is the best P4P fighter in MMA? It’s worth arguing about.

…and they are proving as controversial as ever.

Click the link at the top of the page for an overview of the changes made or alternatively view the full, and utterly comprehensive, lists by clicking on the relevant weight class to you left.

Top 70 and rising!

The glorious TOM, compiler of the most complete rankings known to MMAn, has done it again.

Individual weight classes can be found on the left menu, or an overview of the changes made can be seen at the top of this page.

As ever, our shameless bias to both handsome people and TUL$A TOP TEAM is prevalent.

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By Marc Staehling

Before getting knee deep into the lightweight rankings, I’d like to take a moment to acknowldge Antonio Rodrigo Nogueira’s historic feat this past weekend. He was already a legend, and a first-ballot hall of famer, but with his victory over Tim Sylvia on Saturday, “Minotauro” is most certainly, one of the greatest fighters of all time.

Ranking fighters is difficult business, especially the lightweight division. As I illustrated in Part One and Part Two, because of the vast array of fighters in various organizations fighting between 150 and 160 lbs, coming up with a definitive ranking is essentially impossible. What I can, and will do, is look at some online MMA rankings and offer my critique.

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It’s safe to say that the deepest, and most consistently entertaining division in mixed martial arts is the lightweight division. Just a glance at fight of the year candidates over the last several years and you’ll see a slough of classic lightweight bouts. Uno/Sato 5/99, Penn/Pulver 1/02, Sato/Nakayama 11/02, Uno/Hansen 3/05, Hansen/Azeredo 4/06, Gomi/Diaz 2/07, Griffin/Edgar 2/07 and Huerta/Guida 12/07 are just a sampling of the fantastic lightweight fights that have taken place over the last several years.
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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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