The hosts of The Hammer MMA Radio have been contributing to the UFC’s Official Fighter Rankings since its’ inception earlier this year. While the UFC has confirmed that these rankings may not necessarily impact their matchmaking, the three of us still put a lot of thought into our selection process at the conclusion of each event. Following each event we will be breaking down our thought process on a few of the relevant divisions right here at Last Word On Sports.
You can find our updated rankings, as well as the overall UFC rankings at http://www.ufc.com/rankings, all updated on the Monday immediately following every UFC event.
UFC 169: Barao vs. Faber
Steve Jeffery: We have had Featherweight contender Ricardo Lamas locked in as the #1 contender for a while. It’s been a tough call to order the foursome of Lamas, Mendes, Swanson and Edgar, and an argument could be made to arrange them in almost any order from #1-4. Lamas won out as he had a series of Top Ten wins that the other guys didn’t have. Also, Mendes had a lack of quality opponents, and Edgar has only had two fights in the division.
Lamas losing to Aldo this last weekend (a fate also suffered by Mendes last year) combined with Mendes being on a hot streak seems just enough to swap their places.
With Jose Aldo likely vacating his title to go to Lightweight soon, the four highest ranked Featherweights will most likely be fighting each other to further distinguish their place in the division.
Steve Jeffery: John Lineker has been a tough Flyweight to rank, a tough Flyweight to book fights for, and a tough Flyweight to bet money on. This is all because prior to last Saturday’s fight against Ali Bagautinov, Lineker had missed weight in almost all of his Flyweight fights in the UFC.
Even though he was missing weight, he was still winning fights and slowly moving up the ranks towards title contention. He actually almost missed weight again the other night and required the extra hour grace period to make the 126 pound limit. Even if he had won that night, he would still need to make exactly 125 pounds for the title fight to count. That could be a huge problem for everyone involved.
Ali Bagautinov solved this problem by going out there and beating Lineker, while possibly even securing a title shot for himself. We already had “The Puncher King” ranked pretty high at #5, and while we still couldn’t quite move him past former contender John Moraga, whatever his next fight is, it should be the biggest of his career.
Steve Jeffery: While there wasn’t actually a women’s bantamweight fight at UFC 169, there was still an interesting development in their divisional rankings that day.
Way back in October at UFC 166 there was a fight between Sarah Kaufman and Jessica Eye. Kaufman was much higher ranked at the time than Eye (who actually wasn’t ranked at all), and by most accounts Kaufman won the fight. The judges somehow disagreed and awarded the fight to Eye, and we decided to rank her directly below Kaufman due to the controversial nature of the decision.
For reasons currently unknown, the fight was overturned to a No Contest this past weekend, and now Eye doesn’t have an actual win in the UFC anymore. As a result, we dropped her a few more spots, but only a few since she was on a good run prior, and even a close fight with Sarah Kaufman is worth something.
The Hammer MMA Radio has featured interviews with some of the biggest names in MMA over the years, including Georges St. Pierre, Matt Hughes, BJ Penn, Sean Sherk, Mark Coleman, Renan Barao, Rory MacDonald, Brendan Schaub, Mark Bocek, Nate Diaz, Mark Hominick, Martin Kampmann, Sara McMann, and many more, all of which are archived at http://www.thehammermma.com.
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