The Ultimate Fighter / UFC thread

[gehrig]

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i really hate how rankings are always retrospective instead of predictive

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Meh. I don't mind if that's the goal set out by the rankers. For instance, would you put B.J. Penn in the top 10 lightweights in the world, even though he's only fought in the weight class once in the past 4 years?

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penn now fights at lightweight and i think hes pretty clearly one of the ten best fighters in that division, so if i was doing a top ten using my own criteria i would rank him

i just think "who is the best" is a much more interesting question than "who has accomplished the most"

[MikeyPatriot]

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penn now fights at lightweight and i think hes pretty clearly one of the ten best fighters in that division, so if i was doing a top ten using my own criteria i would rank him

i just think "who is the best" is a much more interesting question than "who has accomplished the most"

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IMO, I think "Who is the best" type of rankings are too subjective. I'm not saying you're wrong, but I just prefer as much objectivity as possible.

For instance, I've nearly completed my first beatpaths style graph for the middleweight division. Here's how the system ranks the MW top 10:

1. Anderson Silva
2. Yushin Okami
3. Paulo Filho
4. Matt Lindland
5. Yoshihiro Akiyama
6. Denis Kang
7. Robbie Lawler
8. Rich Franklin
9. Dan Henderson
T. Alan Belcher

I'm gonna start a blog up eventually and have an explanation for this. One criteria that I should note is that I only counted fights in the MW division in the past 3 years. Anyway, Okami benefits a lot from his DQ win over Silva. Belcher's probably the only "huh?" guy on there, and he benefits a lot from his win over Kalib Starnes. The guys at 11 and 12 are Akihiro Gono and Nathan Marquardt.

[lapoker17]

i am still in the middle of watching every ufc fight i can get my hands on, but would just like to say that rich franklin is (was?) sick. first time i saw him was the silva fight so i didn't really understand how impressive that victory was for silva, but i just watched a bunch of franklin's earlier fights where he just destroys good competition and i was pretty impressed. (i think you made a post about his credentials somewhere after the silva fight, mikey, so that's why i checked him out). i watched him vs tanner/shamrock/quarry/dewees/mcdonald and jorge rivera. wow.

[LyinKing]

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i am still in the middle of watching every ufc fight i can get my hands on, but would just like to say that rich franklin is (was?) sick. first time i saw him was the silva fight so i didn't really understand how impressive that victory was for silva, but i just watched a bunch of franklin's earlier fights where he just destroys good competition and i was pretty impressed. (i think you made a post about his credentials somewhere after the silva fight, mikey, so that's why i checked him out). i watched him vs tanner/shamrock/quarry/dewees/mcdonald and jorge rivera. wow.

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At the risk of redundancy/namedropping, I just want to reiterate something germane given lapoker's point above. I've trained with Rich Franklin, completely humbling experience. That he can be completely dismantled is truly mindblowing.