Ratings and rankings are both ways to indicate someone or something’s relative standing. However, ratings seek to gauge the value within a finite spectrum, in the case of MMA Ratings, the five star system. Meanwhile rankings seek to determine the value within a sequential order.
MMA Ratings uses fight and event ratings, to ultimately determine fight and event rankings.
Meanwhile, every site seems to have their own fighter rankings, and every fan seems to want to publicize their own rankings. The result is that the multitude of fighter rankings are so speculative and diluted that they lose their value. Bloody Elbow seeks to create meta-rankings, which combine the results of major fighter ranking providers. MMA Playground‘s fighter rankings are based off of the community’s fighter rankings via their My Fighter Rankings page.
At MMA Ratings I rate every fight on a five star scale.
I encourage everyone to rate the fights however they choose. Five stars allows for some simple ratings breakdowns: great, good, okay, boring, horrible.
I’ve broken down my personal rating system more granularly into the following criteria: relevance, action, skill.
On the surface, that’s pretty simple, but I also add the following modifiers for consideration:
Relevance looks something like: major title relevance: 5 stars, title fight: 4 stars, contender fight: 3 stars, journeyman/up and comers: 2 stars, don’t care: 1 star. When it comes to mismatches, I usually base the relevance on the lesser competitor. If there is a lot of hype leading up to the fight, I may give it a +1 (Lesnar, Kimbo, etc.).
Action is pretty intuitive. I will give the action -1 if the fight ends very quickly (in less than 3 or 4 minutes).
Skill is a combination of the skill displayed by both fighters. I will give skill -1 if the fight is a mismatch.