LW championship timeline

[zec1234]

In my previous post I presented HW championship timeline.

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

Now I will do the same for the LW champions.

This is my attempt to define who are the greatest MMA LW champions?
And, this is based just on the championship bouts, not overall career (for that we have All Time rankings).

 

[zec1234]

First LW champion was Yuichi Watanabe. That was Shooto promotion in 1991.

But right now, we will skip that early period and start with 8 man, 1 day LW Lumax tournament in 1997.
That was all Japanese tournament, but at that time they were best in lightweight categories.
Naoya Uematsu won the tournament by submitting (Achilles Lock) Caol Uno in the finals

First big championship bout was in 1999 for Shooto vacant belt. Caol Uno defeated Rumina Sato.
In Dec 2000, Uno defended that belt in a rematch with Sato.
Then he vacated that Shooto belt and fought Pulver for inagural UFC LW belt.

After Pulver defended UFC belt two times, he had a contract dispute with UFC.
In 2003, B.J. Penn and Caol Uno fought to a draw for the vacant title.
---------------

 

[zec1234]

After 2003 title bout failed to produce new UFC champion, UFC suspended LW division for the next couple of years.

But LW fighters were very active in Japan.

 

[zec1234]

Here is a graph with the historical LW Title picture for period 2009 - 2015.

In 2009 UFC was already the biggest MMA organization, but some other organizations had good LW divisions.
That is why I included LW title bouts for WEC (yellow), Strikeforce (blue) and Dream (purple).

 

[ironfist05]

http://www.fightmatrix.com/lineal-championship-histories/lightweights/

 

[zec1234]

I added the graph for period 2009 - 2015.
Now you can start with your comments.

 

[zec1234]

http://www.fightmatrix.com/lineal-championship-histories/lightweights/

I saw several versions of LW Lineal Championship.

In most often used version, LW Title goes to Japan and stays there until 2012, when Eddie Alvarez brings it to Bellator.
So, in this version all UFC LW champions since 2008 are skipped.

In another version LW Lineal title somehow stays in USA and completely ignores Takanori Gomi.


If you check that Fightmatrix link (LW Lineal champions on their website), you will see that BJ, Edgar, Benson, Pettis and RDA are not included there.

In that golden UFC LW period (2008 - 2015) they have following LW Lineal champions:
Sergey Golyaev, Eiji Mitsuoka, Kazunori Yokota, Tatsuya Kawajiri, Shinya Aoki, Eddie Alvarez, Donald Cerrone.

So, what that all means?
Isn't Lineal Championship meaningless and just a fun way to do MMA math?
CoffeeAndBeer, what do you say?

 

[zec1234]

For each championship bout we calculate a score (Championship bout Level) where the maximum value is 8.
To calculate championship bout level 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 all UFC LW title fights since 2005:

Marker with + represents title defense and X is title capture.