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What I would like to do in this thread is to initiate a meaningful discussion on what kind of ranking system MMA needs.
I will start with a short dissertation and then ask you a few related questions.
Every reputable sport has rankings. Not just sport, but many human activities (like education, employment, finances, ...) have rankings for people and institutions.
So there should be no question if MMA needs rankings.
Question is, do we need the point-based rankings for MMA fighters?
This implies existence of formula and rules that are used to calculate points for each fighter.
There are number of different methods that can be used to create rankings.
Most popular is having a voting panel of experts. Some websites have a panel with one expert, some consist of a few internal experts.
UFC has rankings generated by external voting panel made up of media members. They are asked to vote for who they feel are the top fighters in the UFC. The only dictated placing is champion being automatically at the top position.
Most of the times those experts don't give much explanation on how they created their rankings. Just a simple list from 1 to 10.
Some rankings use polls of non-experts and some use betting markets.
Sometimes we see the power ratings that have extensive textual explanation, but no formula or methodology.
Then there are some systems that combine multiple ranking sources with different ranking approaches. They mix them together and generate some kind of amalgamated score. If that score relies on other voting or poll based rankings, we cannot consider them as real point-based systems. Even if they have some kind of formula that generates score. That is basically just averaging of multiple expert poling / voting rankings.
I will start with a short dissertation and then ask you a few related questions.
Every reputable sport has rankings. Not just sport, but many human activities (like education, employment, finances, ...) have rankings for people and institutions.
So there should be no question if MMA needs rankings.
Question is, do we need the point-based rankings for MMA fighters?
This implies existence of formula and rules that are used to calculate points for each fighter.
There are number of different methods that can be used to create rankings.
Most popular is having a voting panel of experts. Some websites have a panel with one expert, some consist of a few internal experts.
UFC has rankings generated by external voting panel made up of media members. They are asked to vote for who they feel are the top fighters in the UFC. The only dictated placing is champion being automatically at the top position.
Most of the times those experts don't give much explanation on how they created their rankings. Just a simple list from 1 to 10.
Some rankings use polls of non-experts and some use betting markets.
Sometimes we see the power ratings that have extensive textual explanation, but no formula or methodology.
Then there are some systems that combine multiple ranking sources with different ranking approaches. They mix them together and generate some kind of amalgamated score. If that score relies on other voting or poll based rankings, we cannot consider them as real point-based systems. Even if they have some kind of formula that generates score. That is basically just averaging of multiple expert poling / voting rankings.