The “Generated Historical Rankings” are now live and can be accessed via this link and through our nav menus. The first ranking set was created for 1/1/1994, with subsequent ranking sets created on a quarterly basis.
We plan on refreshing these rankings every so often, as the software and historical data continues to improve. The update frequency has yet to be determined.
Furthermore, I did my best to refine some past divisional data when I generated these rankings (which actually caused some changes on the All-Time Rankings). However, there is CLEARLY room for improvement. Items to consider are as follows:
- Old divisional data is largely not available for early MMA — and often times, divisions were not at all considered. If weights were available, I used that to derive a division. Trust me when I say, I am an exceptional researcher — though I don’t always have the research material available. For lack of complexity and confusion, I kept our same divisional ranges when generating the historical rankings.
- The Division Dominance lists aren’t always going to make sense due to the above.
- In almost all usually controlled instances, top fighters were not kept in their native division for making one-time unsuccessful stops in other divisions (Example: Rua getting Hammerhoused at Heavyweight) — the type of “common sense” stuff that is easier to keep track of for current rankings. I’m more than willing to make these changes, but updates will only be reflected when the sets are refreshed.
- When tuning and updating the software, preference is always given to the present. It’s possible that I “missed” a few items that should have been adjusted to the date of the generated ranking when generating them, though, we obviously aim for making the current rankings shine.
Feel free to offer any suggestions to us for improvements.