Junior dos Santos (left): Dave Mandel/Sherdog.com
-- Marvin
Mike Fridley, managing editor: I’m glad that a reader took time to send email on this specific topic. In fact, we received several inquiries through the online contact form that echoed your thoughts precisely.
As a diehard sports fan and a senior ranking panelist, I often wear my opinions upon my sleeve. This past ranking period was no exception, as internal debate raged through the inboxes of Sherdog.com staff and showed a level of transparency I haven’t seen for quite some time.
Some on staff preferred Werdum and Fedor in the top two slots. Others favored the reflected order in the published edition, with Brock Lesnar in the top spot. I agreed and argued only that Werdum could not be seeded above dos Santos, who demolished Fedor’s conqueror in a mere 81 seconds with a jaw-jarring knockout at UFC 90.
Dos Santos ranked above Werdum is familiar thinking in action. Decades of sporting precedence can be applied to the ranking conundrum that followed the first legitimate loss of MMA’s greatest heavyweight of all time.
Or can it?
Common sense tells the fan accustomed to NCAA football and basketball polls that if No. 9 (Werdum) beats No. 1 (Fedor) in a perfect showing, but gets blown out by No. 6 (dos Santos), that it’s No. 6 that stands the most to gain. In this instance, Werdum’s win is dos Santos’ win, because it improves his strength of schedule, and he hasn’t lost since the matchup.
While it’s certainly feasible for the world of basketball and football, I’m sorry to inform you (and thus, realize myself) that this logic does not directly apply to mixed martial arts rankings.
First, there’s a distance in quality between the top and bottom of basketball and football’s top 10 that isn’t present in MMA. A team ranked in the eight or nine slot in college sports is likely ineligible to leapfrog a team it has previously lost to -- assuming the higher-ranked team is riding a winning streak -- due to the win/loss tally that placed the team in the lower position to begin with. This is a hard sell for an MMA crossover formula, where fighters perform in competing leagues and there is no end-all structure.
The competitive schedules in most sports are clearly defined -- depending on one’s personal hatred for the Bowl Championship Series model -- with a closing final to decide the best of the best: One season, comprising of several months before a team’s final merit is judged. Save for the Bellator series, in MMA there is no such framework.
The Sherdog.com rankings are formulated by looking at a fighter’s résumé in roughly a three-year window. This makes it difficult to gauge one fighter’s wins and loses against another’s. In the last three years, Werdum has lost only to dos Santos. “Cigano” on the other hand, has a defeat to Joaquim Ferreira. One man fights in the UFC, the other Strikeforce. Werdum’s biggest win is against Fedor. Dos Santos’ defining victory is against Werdum.
All I’ve learned through this process is that right or wrong, Werdum over dos Santos is just another example of how rankings are relative, and nothing more than opinion. As long as there are walls between promotions and fans willing to debate the placement of their favorite fighters, the issue of apples against oranges will continue to loom.
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