All HW champions fights - who are the greatest MMA HW champions?

[zec1234]

What do you guys think about ranking the greatest MMA HW champions?
How that ranking should look like and what do you use to create that ranking?

As a reference I will show historical time line with fights for the most prestigious HW belts.

 

[zec1234]

In the 1990's UFC had number of Openweight and HW tournaments.
First non-tournament title is an openweight title from 1995. This title was used before the introduction of weight classes in 1997. It was created to have a reigning UFC champion that would be challenged by the UFC tournament winners.

So, we can say that first UFC reigning champion was Ken Shamrock.
He defended ("d") title twice and then the title were captured ("c") by Dan Severn.
In 1990's UFC HW title was vacated twice (Randy Couture departed and Bas Rutten retired).

At that time In parallel with UFC we had Pancrase Openweight/HW champions, but for many reasons people don't value that belt as much as it should be.
We also had some other big HW tournaments like IAFC (Ricardo Morais), and Rings (Volk Han, Kiyoshi Tamura).

In 2000 Rings started organizing big HW tournaments and in 2001 we have first reigning Pride HW champion.

 

[zec1234]

Golden period for HW was from 2002 to 2008.

Pride had better HW fighters, but in UFC there were much more HW championship bouts.
In 4 years of Pride HW reign, Fodor defended his title only 3 times.

Surprisingly, fighter with the most championship bouts in this period is Tim Sylvia.
He captured the title twice, defended 3 times and lost the title two times. He was also defeated twice in the fights for the interim belt.

 

[zec1234]

In the last 7 years we have the following HW championship picture:

 

[zec1234]

On those graphs full colored line represents reign timeline.
Each box is one month. Orange is used for UFC champion.

Letters that are used on the timeline graph represent championship fights :
v - captured vacant title (first championship for the organization, or previous champion was stripped of the title)
c - captured belt by fighting current champion
d - defended the belt
i - interim belt
"." - dot symbolizes losing championship fight.
"?" - future championship bout


I will continue adding more material and you can let me know your thoughts.

 

[McDego]

Timmay has the most UFC HW title defenses with 3.

Randy, Cain, and Brock have 2.

Fedor had 3 defenses (in 10 years..?).

Nog never defended his title.

 

[Merman]

Fedor had 3 defenses (in 10 years..?).

Read again buddy...

 

[Cooliox]

needs bigger screens, better color coding, and more spacing between options.

 

[TheRuthlessOne]

Timmay has the most UFC HW title defenses with 3.

Randy, Cain, and Brock have 2.

Fedor had 3 defenses (in 10 years..?).

Nog never defended his title.

Yep

 

[zec1234]

Not all championship bouts are at the same level.
That is also something that needs to be taken into account when determining who is bigger champion.

For each championship bout we calculate the Championship bout Level.
The maximum value for this is 8.
To calculate this we use following:
- what was the current ranking of those two fighters (ranking before and after) .
- how strong the Promotion was at that time
- how strong the division was at that time

Here is the Championship Bout Level for the UFC and Pride when they both existed.

 

[zec1234]

In general, Pride HW division was stronger than UFC HW, and their belt had higher importance.

But that was not always the case.

For example, in November 2001, in the span of two days we had both UFC (Nov 2) and Pride (Nov 3) title fights.
First fight was Randy Couture vs. Pedro Rizzo rematch.
And second was for the inaugural Pride belt, Nogueira - Heath Herring.
At that time, UFC still had stronger HW division than Pride.
That is why Randy Couture vs. Pedro Rizzo has a higher (6.2) title bout level than Nogueira - Herring (5.5).
You can find those two numbers on the previous graph.

 

[CoffeeAndBeer]

Timmay has the most UFC HW title defenses with 3.

Randy, Cain, and Brock have 2.

Fedor had 3 defenses (in 10 years..?).

Nog never defended his title.

Yep

This should help you realized why the notion of "title defenses" is such a dinky, weak, worthless notion.. in the CONTEXT of the ERA.

Fedor had 10 Wins over Top 10 Ranked Opponents in his 7 YEAR reign as the Consensus #1 HW in the World.

 

[JohnnyTowers]

Fedor
Werdum
Coleman(mult-tourny and a gp champ)
Sylvia

Nice graphs btw

 

[Future GOAT]

Interesting stuff, thanks.

 

[CoffeeAndBeer]

What do you guys think about ranking the greatest MMA HW champions?
How that ranking should look like and what do you use to create that ranking?

As a reference I will show historical time line with fights for the most prestigious HW belts.

Hey did you see my thread: The Reign of every Consensus #1 HW -- from Mark Kerr to Fabricio Werdum...
And TheComebackKid's: TheComebackKid's Top 15 Greatest HW's of All Time

I love the topic. Appreciate the effort/work.

I was looking to put together a historic comparison of the "Consensus #1" versus "Lineal Champ" versus "Belt holders". Starting with the HWs. Your graphs/timelines should come in handy.

MMA needs conscientious, fair-mined, aficionados of the sport to provide proper context to this early era of the sport.

 

[zec1234]

Fedor
Werdum
Coleman(mult-tourny and a gp champ)
Sylvia

Nice graphs btw

Thanks.

I agree that Fedor is on the top of the HW champions list.
Not just because of Pride title fights, he also won one strong HW tournament (Rings 2001) and WAMMA belt at Affliction 1 (Tim Sylvia).

But who is at #2 and why?
We are talking about HW Titles, so Werdum (just 2 fights for a belt) is still not in the consideration for this list.

Tim Sylvia, Big Nog, Randy Couture or Cain Velasquez?

 

[Jaymo_ie]

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[Priceinator]

Nice work.

Fedor is #1 for now. If Cain comes back, wins the belt back and defends for a couple more years, I could see him getting there.

#2 can go to Nog. His wins and legacy are hard to top.

#3 is Sylvia 100%. He deserves it. He beat prime AA. He was a monster.

#4 Cain atm. Could be Cro Cop or Randy.

 

[McDego]

This should help you realized why the notion of "title defenses" is such a dinky, weak, worthless notion.. in the CONTEXT of the ERA.

Fedor had 10 Wins over Top 10 Ranked Opponents in his 7 YEAR reign as the Consensus #1 HW in the World.

10 top 10 wins in 10 years with 18 wins vs non ranked fighters and only 3 title defenses.

:redface:

 

[kikikhan]

Title defences in Pride were weird.

Fedor successfully defended his nr.1 position 18 f*cking times. 10 times vs top 10 HWs, 2x vs top 15 HWs, 2 olympic medalists, 2 giant undefeated fighters, Valivicius (for money) and Nagata for money.

That's at least 10 legit title defences.