Pound For Pound: Statistically Speaking

Sherdog recently released their newest pound-for-pound rankings after Fedor's stunning KO over Andrei Arlovski and Georges St. Pierre's utter domination of BJ Penn. Their rankings have caused quite the stir amongst many in the MMA community.

For most people, the pound-for-pound rankings represent a sort of who's who of the MMA world. The athletes that frequent the top of the list represent the upper echelon of mixed martial artists in the world.

It's not about who has the best professional record. For many, it's who is able to utterly dominate their competition, as long as their competition is actually good.

Unfortunately, these rankings tend to be highly influenced by the subjective views of the one who does the rankings. A perfect example is BJ Penn, who moves up in a weight class to face another top pound for pound fighter in GSP.

Everyone thought this fight was going to be close, even the betting lines reflected this. Yet BJ Penn got beat, and not just beat, but utterly defeated. The fight was not even close by anyone's standard.

Penn's loss signifies that he is not as good as everyone thinks, if he were he could have at least put up a decent fight. He should have plummeted in the rankings because of his poor performance, but he did not.

Instead, he maintained the exact same place on the pound-for-pound list despite decisively losing a match that literally is the measure of a top pound-for-pound fighter, fighting outside your weight class.

This BJ Penn loss would then suggest that BJ's high ranking in the pound-for-pound list was and is inflated because of the subjective nature of the list.

Lucky for us, there is already a system in place to objectively rank fighters within, and across, weight classes and currently and all-time. This system is called Elo-Chess.

Elo-Chess

Fully understanding Elo-Chess is unnecessary. Instead, what's important is understanding that if a fighter wins, he gains points and if a fighter loses, he loses points. A simple philosophy with crystal clear results.

All fighters start at a ranking of 1500, so the farther above 1500 a fighter is, the better the fighter. Fighters with rankings of 1500-1700 are considered entry-level or journey fighters, fighters with rankings between 1700-1900 are considered mid-range fighters, and fighters with rankings above 1900 are generally considered the top fighters in the world.

Let's look at a fighter and see how they are. Chuck Liddell is a perfect example a fighter who at one time was considered one of the best fighters in the world, and by many, still is. Let's see if the numbers still show this. His current ranking is 1998 and the maximum ranking he had at one time was 2170. He definitely was and still is an elite fighter.

Another example is Travis Fulton, who has over 200 professional fights. Travis Fulton's current ranking is 1734 and his maximum ranking was 1853. He is just where we would expect him to be. This is because the number of points a fighter gets for winning or losing is dependent on the competition.

Beating a fighter with a higher ranking gives you more points and losing to a better fighters makes you lose less points.

Pound for Pound

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