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.
Hammer Official UFC Rankings Breakdown
UFC Fight Night: Munoz vs. Mousasi & UFC Fight Night: Miocic vs. Maldonado
Steve Jeffery: It is kind of amazing that the UFC could put on two full events (including a total of more than 20 fights) on the very same day, with barely anything having an effect on the Top 15 rankings.
The only division that had any real movement was the middleweight division, as the two top matches on the Berlin card had a total of four ranked middleweights competing. That setup made it pretty easy to adjust the rankings in the division, with winners going up and losers going down.
CB Dollaway continued the best run of his career by defeating the higher ranked Francis Carmont and taking his spot at #8. Then Gegard Mousasi had his first solid win since entering the UFC when he quickly finished Mark Munoz and took his #6 spot in the process.
So some new blood entered the top ten (ours, not the overall consensus…sorry CB Dollaway), and next time out Carmont and Munoz will need to prove that they are still deserving of top ten status.
Steve Jeffery: Stipe Miocic was expected to headline last weekend’s UFC event in Brazil against the #1 ranked Junior Dos Santos, who would have been the toughest opponent of his career.
Dos Santos was injured just a couple of weeks before the fight and the replacement was the unranked light heavyweight Fabio Maldonado. This was a lose-lose situation for Miocic, who gains no heavyweight credibility by beating a smaller, less skilled opponent. Even worse, if he had actually lost it would been a significantly larger setback than just losing to the second best heavyweight in the world.
Obviously Miocic won. He did so in quick and violent fashion, and he’s staying exactly where he was prior to the fight with Maldonado.
Note: There is currently a programming error on the official UFC.com Rankings page. Some voter’s ballots in certain division are not displaying correctly. As a result, we have not completed a write-up on our changes to the UFC Bantamweight division. Fight Metric has confirmed that all votes have been tallied correctly as part of the overall Top 15 in every division, despite any display errors.
The Hammer MMA Radio has featured interviews with some of the biggest names in MMA over the years, including Matt Hughes, BJ Penn, Sean Sherk, Mark Coleman, Michael Bisping, Dan Henderson, Renan Barao, Rory MacDonald, Brendan Schaub, Nate Diaz, Mark Hominick, TJ Dillashaw, Sara McMann, and many more, all of which are archived at http://www.thehammermma.com.
The Hammer MMA Radio continues to bring unparalleled, independent coverage of all things MMA to fans of the sport and they always bring you straight goods and the last word, and we at LWOS are pleased to be partners with them.
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