The Explanation of My (Not So) Much-Anticipated (Blog) UFC Ranking System

I’ve been meaning to do this for months (it might actually be closing in on a year now), but what better time than now — several days before yet another UFC event that will render these outdated — for me to publish my UFC rankings on this here blog?

The reason I’ve been dragging my feet for so long on posting these is, basically, because I feel obligated to explain the process behind the tabulation of the ratings. And that’s the purpose of this particular post — the rankings themselves will come later. The super short explanation goes like this: I’ve applied the same principles FIFA uses to rank international soccer sides to UFC fights. What this means, essentially, is that I take four years worth of fight results, weight them based on how recent the fights are (multipliers range from 0.2 to 1.0 based on the 12-month period in which a fight falls) as well as the quality of opposition, and come up with a numerical value for each fighter. Because MMA and soccer have some inherent differences, however, I had to tailor some of the multipliers involved in terms of fixture/fight prestige, as well as how victory is achieved. In the case of soccer, the results-based multipliers (blatantly copied and pasted from Wikipedia) are as follows:

Result	Points
Win (no penalty shootout)	3
Win (penalty shootout)	2
Draw	1
Loss (penalty shootout)	1
Loss (no penalty shootout)	0

The easy way to do this probably would’ve been to just disregard anything related to a penalty shootout. But the prevailing mentality in UFC, or at least those running things there, tends to be that it’s better for fighters to finish fights and keep their fate out of the hands of the judges. It makes perfect sense, and therefore I concluded that I would award the 3-point multiplier to fighters who finished their opponent, and award a 2-point multiplier to victors through decision. The rest is fairly straight-forward: a draw is a draw, and keeps its one-point multiplier while a loss, even in the case of a decision, is worth 0. Just to be clear about all of this, I’ll create a table of my own. (That is, I’ll type this into Excel and then copy it over here so as to make it look nothing like the Wikipedia table.):

Result	Points
Win (Knockout or Submission)	3
Win (Decision)	2
Draw	1
Loss	0
No Contest	0

There shouldn’t be any real big surprises there. The area that could be up for greater debate is the values I’ve assigned for fight status. First, a look at the FIFA version:

Match status	Multiplier
Friendly match	x 1.0
FIFA World Cup and Continental cup qualifiers	x 2.5
Continental cup and Confederations Cup finals	x 3.0
World Cup finals match	x 4.0

Obviously, there aren’t any cup matches in the Ultimate Fighting Championship, so I needed to determine what the equivalents to each of these events was. The easiest equivalents I came up with were prelim fights as friendlies and championship fights as World Cup finals equivalents. The rest is probably open for debate, but here’s what I came up with: