Our partners in crime over at Fightlinker.com posted a post (?) about how the guys from bloody elbow posted MMA rankings that have been picked up by USA today. Cool. If rankings weren’t stupid. I think Ryan from fightlinker sums it up nicely with this line from their post:

“In the end though, rankings are fucking dumb and shouldn’t be used as anything other than for reference or to piss off people you disagree with.”

Boxing has rankings. And they’re also stupid, but what people forget is that official boxing rankings were invented and made prominent to serve and actual purpose: to determine who deserves to fight for a championship belt.

There has always been debate about who deserves a title shot and who doesn’t, and rankings were originally used to help sanctioning organizations figure this out. Yes, they are still retarded, but they weren’t rankings for the sake of rankings, like they are now in MMA.

If a sanctioning body in boxing wants to rank fighters, they do so with fighters in their organization, and have zero jurisdiction to begin ranking fighters in other org’s.

In MMA, there’s one HUGE organiazation (the UFC) and an assload of shitty little ones with a handful of fighters, who for the most part were rejected from the HUGE org.

Pretty much what I’m saying is that rankings are completely asinine because the only way to truly find out which fighter is better than another is to have them fight, that unless there’s a point to making rankings other than satisfying your own bullshit analysis they simply don’t make sense to have, and unless they are put out by a legitimate organization, and it about their own fighters, you might as well get your 3 year old cousin to pick them for you.

Rank em’, debate em’, masterbait to em’.

Just don’t put them in a G-Damn newspaper and call em’ legit.