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FightOpinion.com Top 25 Welterweights
By jasonadams | March 10, 2006
By Jason Adams
Pre-PRIDE 31 and UFC 58 rankings.
| 1.Matt Hughes |
| 2.BJ Penn |
| 3.Georges St. Pierre |
| 4.Karo Parisyan |
| 5.Frank Trigg |
| 6.Sean Sherk |
| 7.Diego Sanchez |
| 8.Joe Riggs |
| 9.Akira Kikuchi |
| 10.Jake Shields |
| 11.Nick Diaz |
| 12.Charuto Verissimo |
| 13.Jason Black |
| 14.Spencer Fisher |
| 15.Nick Thompson |
| 16.Josh Burkman |
| 17.Drew Fickett |
| 18.Josh Koscheck |
| 19.Chris Lytle |
| 20.Carlos Condit |
| 21.Joe Stevenson |
| 22.Duane Ludwig |
| 23.Josh Neer |
| 24.Carlo Prater |
| 25.Jonathan Goulet |
Topics: All Topics, Jason Adams, MMA | 4 Comments » | Permalink | Trackback |
Kind of funny though that when your #3 welterweight Georges St. Pierre fought your #5 welterweight Frank Trigg, he made him look like he never fought in his life. Also, Ludwig at #22 beat Goulet #25 quicker than took me to write this sentence. Just some funny stuff about how the UFC can be. Check out my blog UFCblog.blogspot.com (formerly Fightblog which you linked to before-thank you). I really like fight opinion
What ever happend to Karo? He had his title shot but got injured and now no one has heard anything from him since. When will he fight again?
I think Spencer Fisher and Josh Neer will be moving up this list quickly over the course of 2006.
This is the category that frustrates me to no end because of what PRIDE has done with their “Lightweight” division, which is 165 pounds or so. Do you merge both PRIDE and UFC’s divisions to come up with a more complete list?
If we’re sticking strictly with what is on this list, Hughes is the dominant one with St. Pierre #2, Penn #3, and then anyone’s game underneath. There are way too many Americans on this list. Trigg is a good fighter, but not a #1. So #4 is fine for him. Diego Sanchez is better than Sean Sherk (who for the life I cannot understand why people online continue to push him) and certainly better than Joe Riggs (Joe Riggs belongs on the 185 list, not the 170 pound list). Kikuchi probably deserves to be much higher, maybe #6. Shields is a respectable fighter as well. Nick Diaz also is Top 10 quality. Joe Stevenson is much better than anyone in the 10-20 slot.
I prefer quality over quantity with lists. Again, there are only so many guys you can find for an accurate portrayal per list. Top 12 or 15 is best. Not 25.
Pride’s lightweight division is 160lbs, not 165. It was put there specifcially for Gomi when he became to big to make 155lbs any more.
Also, this list is a bit ethnocentric considering that only 8 of top 25 welterweights in the world come from promotions other than the UFC.
MMA rankings done across promotions like this one, do not work because its not a realistic comparable sample. Comparing fighter that compete under different rule sets makes any such list almost completely worthless from the very beginning. The other part is there’s no way to rank or adjust rankings for fighters who will never compete against each other. You don’t have a meaningful mechanism to quantify that. If you want to rank fighters they should be ranked according to the promotion they fight for most often.