First, a run-down of the particulars:

• Due to potential metric conversion issues and weight class changes, a limit of 137 pounds is observed for this list.
• Inception of the championship occured on 7/29/1989, the fifth known professional fight taking place at or below 137 pounds, which included the first two winners of Bantamweight bouts in a previous event (the other two bouts were draws).
• Periodic inactivity was a sporadic issue in the Bantamweight division.  In early history, ranked fights were so sporadic, that the winners of these “best available” matches were used to fill gaps.  Idea is to not allow title vacancy for more than 2 years. In later Bantamweight history, only fights between established 1/2, 1/3 or 2/3 were used.

Your current lineal Bantamweight champion is Dominick Cruz

The full history is below.  Note, the colored backgrounds indicate a title change.

MMA Bantamweight Lineal Championship History

Keep Reading

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.

Fightmatrix.com Mixed Martial Arts Rankings Archive has been updated with the rankings for March & April 2010.

We’ve made some technical improvements to our archives that should be transparent to our readers, but will allow us to update the archives more regularly.

Fightmatrix.com Mixed Martial Arts Rankings Archive has been updated with the rankings as of February 7, 2010.

This will likely be the final release of the ranking archives in the current format, as we are working on improving & expanding our historical rankings section.

Fightmatrix.com Mixed Martial Arts Rankings Archive has been updated with the rankings as of January 3, 2010.

Fightmatrix.com Mixed Martial Arts Rankings Archive has been updated with the rankings as of December 7, 2009.

Fightmatrix.com Mixed Martial Arts Rankings Archive has been updated with the rankings as of November 1, 2009.

Fightmatrix.com Mixed Martial Arts Rankings Archive has been updated with the rankings as of October 4, 2009.

Fightmatrix.com Mixed Martial Arts Rankings Archive has been updated with the rankings as of September 7, 2009.

Fightmatrix.com Mixed Martial Arts Rankings Archive has been updated with the rankings as of August 3, 2009.

Fightmatrix.com Mixed Martial Arts Rankings Archive has been updated with the rankings as of July 6, 2009.