He seems like a nice enough guy, sounds personable in interviews, and is the guy who ought to be fighting Fedor, whatever else is wrong with him, just based on his rankings, but he’s a cheating doper who has now tested positive for three different anabolic steroids on two occasions, and had the heavyweight title in MMA’s largest promotion stripped, in large part, apparently, because he couldn’t get along with Dana White.

Not sure how you can fall much lower than that in mainstream MMA fan opinion.

*Fixed

Really? You think that a division with Lesnar, Mir, Couture, Gonzaga, Nogueira, Herring, CroCop, Dos Santos, Carwin, Velazquez and Kongo is weak? Ooookay…

And that brings me right back to the topic at hand:

First of all, it’s of course Barnetts fault. I doubt that Atencio said to him “Dude, take some steroids and cycle that shit, so the people don’t see your moobs when you take off our shirt in the ring!”.

But i can see why people are putting some blame on Affliction, and i can understand where they’re coming from. Atencio (and all the myriads of ex-Pride fanboys) have been talking about Affliction having THE BEST heavyweight division in the sport. Well, just judging by how they’re scrambling to find an opponent for Fedor to fight next week, i’d say NO.

They had FOUR fighters that people knew: Sylvia (done), Arlovski (done), Barnett (obviously done now) and Fedor. That’s it, that’s THE BEST heavyweight division. Affliction doesn’t have any fighters with name value that they could push into the spotlight against Fedor, plain and simple. They reached out to Strikeforce for Rogers and Werdum, and got politely told “Umm, no!”, and will now most probably settle on utilizing one of their few name fighters that the casual fans know – albeit one that fights not one, but two weightclasses below Fedor.

Also, Barnett’s rankings are indicative of inaction doing less harm than embarrassing losses. I honestly don’t know how anyone could be mad at Barnett being ranked ahead of Mir.

Mir got dominated by a LHW fighting at HW and also has losses to Marcio Cruz and Ian Freeman on his record. Does beating a former pro-wrestler in his second fight really boost you up that high? LOL

The UFC’s HW division has been and still is pretty weak. A former pro wrestler with less than five fights managed to capture the tile fairly easily, and prior to that a guy in his mid 40’s won it pretty easily. Crying about the lack of respect UFC’s HW’s get is kind of ridiculous, considering that the division has been a joke (I’ve even heard Dana White talking shit about his former HW champions, for crying out loud)!

Barnett is a cheater and not worthy of consideration anymore. But let’s not pretend like Frank Mir is an amazingly elite fighter who was slighted by not being ranked higher.

Otherwise someone is going to have sick Brandon Vera on him again, so he can be put in his place.

As for saying Affliction & Barnett are equally to blame…. I’m not saying this is Affliction’s fault. However, they already have a track record of a cancelled event. They also have a bad business model. The combination of the two makes it understandable that they are getting heat for this issue.

If they knew how to run a MMA company, they would of had a larger stable of fighters and getting a replacement wouldn’t have been so difficult. But they wanted to run the promotion like a boxing company where it is centralized around one big star. Doesn’t work that way in this sport.

Position has been defended. Credibility still stands.

I’d add Kenny Florian to this list.

Dave Menne has been beaten by many guys at this point in his career. A win over him is not something to put you in the top 10.

That leaves Condit & Thompson. Thompson is a guy with a lot of wins, but has really no quality wins. His biggest win in the last few years is against Eddie Alvarez who really should have been fighting at Lightweight.

His win over Condit is legit. And that win brings him into the Top 10. But that fight was a while ago, and since then he doesn’t have any wins over Top 10 guys (I don’t think Thompson is one).

Also, how can you say he should get ranked over Fitch, when Fitch has a win over Alves?

Matt Hughes has been ranked as low as #10 if not out of the Top 10 now by sites like Sherdog. He has been pushed down due to his high level of competition. Losing to GSP twice and Alves should not know him out of those top spots. Hughes is being punished in the rankings for fighting tougher competition then Shields.

Top 4:

1. GSP
2. Jon Fitch
3. Thiago Alves
4. Matt Hughes

Fitch is at least #5… If not lower. When 14 of the Top 15 guys are in the UFC, how can one guy who isn’t fighting that pool of competition continue to raise in the rankings? It makes no logical sense.