It says something about the division that the two most famous 135-pound MMA fighters in the world are both women: Ronda Rousey and Miesha Tate. The men, despite a head start on the big stage, have fallen a bit behind their female counterparts.
In…
It says something about the division that the two most famous 135-pound MMA fighters in the world are both women: Ronda Rousey and Miesha Tate. The men, despite a head start on the big stage, have fallen a bit behind their female counterparts.
In some ways, bantamweight has been a bit snakebit. Dominick Cruz, the division’s kingpin when the UFC absorbed the now defunct WEC back in 2010, was a truly unique and gifted fighter. He also hasn’t stepped into the cage since a 2011 win over Demetrious Johnson.
In the face of a series of injuries, the UFC admirably stayed by Cruz’s side, continuing to embrace the wayward champion as one of the best fighters in the sport.
When the UFC finally hit the eject button in 2014, it was in favor of Brazilian wunderkind RenanBarao. An all-out media assault followed, including UFC President Dana White reading FightMetric statistics aloud to a skeptical media, attempting to convince them that Barao was the rightful heir to Anderson Silva’s pound-for-pound crown.
It was a marketing campaign Barao immediately set aflame with a lopsided loss to the relatively unknown TJ Dillashaw, putting the division right back at square one. Is Dillashaw the kind of prodigy the promotion promised Barao was?
Either man has an uphill climb in front of him. Neither has star charisma, and without an extended winning streak, it will be difficult to gain traction in an increasingly crowded MMA landscape.
Hope exists outside the UFC, however. Four of the best 15 fighters in this division ply their trade elsewhere, including Marlon Moraes and Eduardo Dantas, two of the best young fighters in the world.
Perhaps, for the first time in almost a decade, the best fighter in the world in his weight class will compete outside the hallowed chain link of the UFC Octagon?
There’s something almost hypnotic about watching the UFC’s flyweights in action. When the very best 125-pounders let fists fly, flitting around an iconic structure that suddenly seems enormous compared to the fighters within, there’s nothing in the wor…
There’s something almost hypnotic about watching the UFC’s flyweights in action. When the very best 125-pounders let fists fly, flitting around an iconic structure that suddenly seems enormous compared to the fighters within, there’s nothing in the world quite like it.
Watching John Dodson fight Demetrious Johnson is perhaps the closest you’ll get to seeing cobra versus mongoose in human form. The speed and skill on display are like nothing else we’ve ever seen in the cage.
Unfortunately, it’s been two years since the UFC debuted its most recent male weight class in Sydney, Australia, and the results have been a decidedly mixed bag for the promotion. Artistically, the fights are critical hits. But at the box office, where real-world decisions are made, the sport’s smallest fighters have failed to ignite interest among casual fans.
At the very top of the division where Johnson reigns, the fighters are as good as any in the sport. But on the margins, the little guys haven’t been around long enough to sort the wheat from the chaff. Most of the UFC’s divisions have a decade or more of history to draw upon, making it easier to gauge a fighter’s relative level. With the flyweights, a bit of guesswork is involved.
This list is not a ranking based on past performance. Instead, these ratings are a snapshot of where these athletes stand right now compared to their peers. We’ve scored each fighter on a 100-point scale based on their abilities in four key categories. You can read more about how the ratings are determined here.
Disagree with our order or analysis? Furious about a notable omission? Let us know about it in the comments.
With respect to skilled fighters starting at 125 pounds, the best of the best heavyweights are truly the world’s baddest men. There’s a reason, after all, that combat sports promoters created weight classes—and it wasn’t to save the big guys from…
With respect to skilled fighters starting at 125 pounds, the best of the best heavyweights are truly the world’s baddest men. There’s a reason, after all, that combat sports promoters created weight classes—and it wasn’t to save the big guys from the psychological harm that comes from an embarrassing loss to a smaller man.
In fighting, bigger is better. Not always more skilled, more diverse or more interesting. But, ultimately, better.
Over the next two weeks, we’ll be rating the 125 best fighters in the world, looking more toward the future than the past. Using statistics from Fight Metric (available for UFC fighters only) and our own subjective analysis, our team has taken the sport’s top fighters and rated them on a 100-point scale. We’ll cover the hummingbird-quick flyweights and the middleweights who combine strength and speed in dizzying combination.
Click here to read the full introduction and explanation for how we scored the fighters.
It all starts with the grizzly bears who occupy the heavyweight division. They may not be the most skilled—something we’ve discovered over the course of countless hours of video review—but size and strength cure many technical ills, and that, the heavyweights have in spades.
The silhouette of the MMA heavyweight has changed quite a bit from the sport’s formative era. Potbellied sluggers like Tank Abbott and Scott Ferrozzo are the past, confined to old videos or some guy’s backyard. The modern Octagon is instead home to sleek athletes like Cain Velasquez and Stipe Miocic, men with much more to offer than a mere willingness to give and take punishment.
Being big and strong is no longer enough. In short, a modern heavyweight looks an awful lot like an actual mixed martial artist. And that, friends, is called progress.
Our team has rated the top 15 heavyweights in the world. You can read more about the criteria in the following slide, and we look forward to hearing your thoughts in the comments.
For years, it was relatively easy to pinpoint the best fighter in mixed martial arts. Depending on your stylistic or aesthetic biases, it was bound to be one of two men.
Fans of unsurpassed artistry gravitated toward Anderson Silva, the middlewei…
For years, it was relatively easy to pinpoint the best fighter in mixed martial arts. Depending on your stylistic or aesthetic biases, it was bound to be one of two men.
Fans of unsurpassed artistry gravitated toward Anderson Silva, the middleweight champion who ruled the 185-pound division with his signature swagger and moments of sheer brilliance. At his best, Silva made the best fighters in his weight class look like children, mere victims to torture and taunt before finally, mercifully, putting them out of their misery.
If your taste ran to the smashmouth, there was Georges St-Pierre, a welterweight legend who used powerful takedowns and a bludgeoning jab to beat all comers for nearly a decade straight. A French Canadian karateka with no formal wrestling pedigree, St-Pierre was somehow able to put even decorated American collegians on their backs with ease, becoming the most dominant grappler in the history of the sport in the process.
They were, with apologies to Fedor Emelianenko and a host of other legends, the two best fighters the sport had ever seen.
No more.
St-Pierre fell victim to lethargy, a battle with UFC over the future of drug testing and, finally, a torn ACL in his left knee. When last we heard from him, he was taking a break from fighting—and it remains unclear if he will ever return to the Octagon.
Silva’s dominance ended in a more traditional manner. He was beaten soundly, twice, by successor Chris Weidman, who may turn out to be an improved version of St-Pierre. In their first fight, the 38-year-old Silva’s age finally caught up with him. His lightning reflexes, the otherworldly head movement and instincts that once evoked comparisons to superhuman characters in The Matrix abandoned him against Weidman, who made the champion pay for dropping his hands and taunting with a left hook to the chin.
When Silva broke his left leg against Weidman’s shin in their rematch, it became clear the king was dead. Though he is training for a return, it’s hard to see the aging and fragile former legend resuming his reign.
MMA is ready for a new king. Pinpointing him, however, isn’t quite as easy as it seems—and that’s pretty exciting. And it’s a question that can’t be answered on paper using the always spurious MMA math.
So, who is the best fighter in MMA? That’s a question we’ve endeavored to answer in comprehensive fashion. It’s one that demands a disciplined and orderly approach. We’ve shined a bright light into murky waters and come back with what we think are the right answers.
It’s time for the ultimate ranking of the sport’s very best: the B/R MMA 125. In the coming days we will rate the top fighters in each weight class, culminating in an enormous pound-for-pound list that includes the 125 best fighters in the sport today. While most of these fighters make the UFC’s Octagon their home, you will find some fighters from Bellator, World Series of Fighting and even athletes from far-flung promotions around the globe.
Our team, consisting of Hunter Homistek, Bleacher Report MMA Editor Brian Oswald, Steven Rondina and Jonathan Snowden—supplemented by experts in the fight field—has watched countless hours of fights. Our goal wasn’t entertainment, but to see exactly what it is fighters do in the cage.
Why do they succeed? And, just as importantly, why do they fail?
While we often went back more than a decade, fights in the last two years were given much more weight. This is not a judgment of a fighter’s legacy or place in the sport’s history; instead, this is a snapshot of a moment in time.
The key word here is rating. This isn’t a traditional ranking system that looks backward at past performances and places fighters in order accordingly. Rather, this is an attempt to capture each fighter in resin in order to gauge where he stands and to extrapolate future performance. It’s about what a fighter can and will do—not just what he’s already done.
In some cases this may mean a fighter rates ahead of someone who actually beat him in the cage. Blasphemy, I know—but a fighter isn’t automatically better than every bested opponent and certainly not better than every foe that opponent has bested in turn. If only it were that simple.
Who are the very best fighters in each weight class? How do they compare, in our four key categories, to the best fighters in other divisions? Hard questions—but we’ve done our best to tackle them.
The Categories
Each allows for a maximum of 25 points. That would be a perfect score—something that, with apologies to St-Pierre’s MMA wrestling, just doesn’t exist. An elite fighter in any category will score 20 and above. A merely average fighter in the following skill sets might score 12 points.
Wrestling. The ability to take an opponent to the mat or to prevent the takedown. Wrestling is arguably the most important skill set, the only one that truly allows a fighter to dictate where and how a fight takes place.
It’s such an important component that UFC matchmakers will give prospects a “wrestling test” against solid grapplers before investing promotional resources in a young fighter. Without the ability to achieve or defend takedowns, a fighter will be unable to succeed at the highest levels of the sport.
Grappling. The combination of positional control and the execution and avoidance of submission holds and locks. Wrestling, for MMA purposes, involves everything leading up to the fighters hitting the mat. Once they are there, that’s grappling. Success here comes in two dramatically different ways.
Conservative fighters take almost no chances in the grappling portion of a bout, preferring to control position rather than risk a submission hold that all too often leaves them vulnerable. The less risk-averse—particularly Brazilian jiu-jitsu masters—will dare all to end the fight in spectacular fashion.
Striking. Hitting an opponent with one of eight limbs and avoiding being hit in turn. For years, striking was the red-headed stepchild of mixed martial arts. The sport was dominated by wrestlers and submission artists, men comfortable on the ground. By the time an expert striker was in range to attack, he found himself on his back, flailing and helpless, a lion suddenly drowning in a shark tank.
Kickboxers Maurice Smith and Mirko “Cro Cop” Filipovic changed that perception, combining just enough wrestling and grappling prowess to keep things on their feet—and interesting. In time, too, grapplers learned that competent striking was a true differentiator. Today, two wrestlers can spend 15 minutes in the cage and never once shoot for a takedown.
Fight IQ and Intangibles. Combining the facets of MMA into a coherent game plan is critical to MMA success. Fighting is a game of human chess; the number of potential attacks is dizzying. The fighter who enters the cage confident in his own tactics and aware of his opponent’s strengths and weaknesses has an enormous advantage.
This category also includes age, athleticism, coaching and level of competition. The days of average athletes rising to the very top of the sport are over. Technique, knowledge and skill can’t wholly overcome athleticism, a fact smart bettors use to make a pretty penny as a new generation of fighters takes over for the stalwarts of days gone by.
Combining these categories can yield a total of 100 points. No fighter on this list comes close to reaching that pinnacle.
Mixed martial arts is a sport no one will ever master. It combines so many diverse elements that no one could ever possibly learn them all. There simply aren’t enough hours in the day to become an Olympic-class wrestler, an Abu Dhabi Combat Club submission expert and a Glory-level kickboxer in a single lifetime.
This isn’t a sport where everyone earns a score of 90 or above as a matter of course. Even the best fighters have massive room for improvement.
You’ll find we’ve rated the best fighters in the world in the 80s, top-10 contenders in the 70s and gatekeepers to greatness in the 60s. These grades aren’t a condemnation of the fighters in question, but rather a testament to how difficult it truly is to master a single martial art—let alone several of them.
The look on Glover Teixeira’s face toward the end of his five-round fight with UFC light heavyweight champion Jon Jones told the story of the fight. There was exhaustion there. Amazement too. And, in the glint of the bright hanging lights, there was so…
The look on Glover Teixeira’s face toward the end of his five-round fight with UFC light heavyweight champion Jon Jones told the story of the fight. There was exhaustion there. Amazement too. And, in the glint of the bright hanging lights, there was something worse—resignation.
Teixeira fought hard until the very end because that’s what fighters do and Teixeira is the real thing. But he never stood a chance against Jones. In his heart, after four rounds of fighting, he knew it.
The fight, remarkably, had played out exactly as it must have in Teixeira’s dreams. Jones, perhaps foolishly, continuously put himself right in the power-puncher’s sweet spot. Jones stood in a phone booth, both men against the cage, and he dared Glover to hit him with his best, testing his will against the challenger’s.
And he won.
Not just the fight, but all 25 minutes of it.
“You’re putting on an amazing, artistic fight,” Jones’ coach, Greg Jackson, told him in the corner as the fifth round beckoned. “It’s beautiful to behold.”
This was Michael Jordan in 1993. This was Muhammad Ali in his prime. This was the best MMA fighter of all time.
Mixed martial arts, dismissed by critics as mindless violence, is actually the most cerebral of sports. Or, perhaps, it’s both things at once. Deadspin’s Josh Tucker calls it a “game theorist’s sex dream,” a sport that attracts some very intellectual eyeballs, in addition to those yearning to see nothing more than someone bleed:
What sets MMA apart from its cousins is that its rules create a strategic and tactical rabbit hole that seemingly descends forever. The seamless combination of striking and grappling, under rules that only barely limit the available targets and attacks, creates a landscape that allows almost unlimited creativity and a wildly high ceiling for execution. Periodically we’re lucky enough to witness a fighter who tests those limits and expands the limits of the possible.
Jones, for all of his physical gifts, is the smartest and most tactically advanced fighter the sport has ever seen. For Teixeira, the goal was simple. He wanted to throw his hard overhand right, his left hook and his uppercut—in that order. If things got desperate, he would attempt a sneaky single leg takedown. And that was it. There were no guessing games. Teixeira is an open book.
Jones is anything but. The length of his playbook is enormous. No fighter in MMA history has had this breadth of techniques at their disposal. Against Teixeira, he was utterly unpredictable. At times he would lead with his unusually pointed elbows, pushing Teixeira into the cage, turning the bout into a dogfight.
Then, as soon as Teixeira would get comfortable with this paradigm, Jones would do something crafty, like faking the elbow and hitting a looping left hook instead. Once they established a rhythm, the two men dancing the world’s most dangerous Tango, Jones would shatter the established comfort zone, suddenly dropping levels for a takedown.
A fight with Jones is as mental as it is physical. Winning requires out-guessing him, not just out-fighting him. As of yet, only Alexander Gustafsson has come close. It’s an exhausting ordeal, not least because Jones seemingly adds a new wrinkle every time he steps in the cage. This time, it was an overhook arm crank, a move so innocuous that most completely missed it in real time. Jones simply engulfed Teixeira’s right arm and squeezed. Teixeira didn’t tap.
There was no immediate effect. But Jones had done serious damage to his opponent’s most dangerous weapon—all with a spur of the moment flashback to high school.
“That’s a move that I’ve been doing since I was a little boy in wrestling,” Jones said at the post-fight press conference. “It was one of the things you couldn’t do on your wrestling partners because it’s dirty in wrestling, but it’s always there when someone has an underhook on you, and you have an overhook, you can just crank their arm.
“I knew it was there. It was nothing studied or anything, I just felt it in the fight and always wanted to do it in those wrestling matches and finally got to hit it on somebody. I felt his elbow pop two times. I heard the ‘pop, pop’ and I was like ‘ah nice’, so I’m glad I got to hit that on him.”
It’s this kind of spur of the moment brilliance that leaves potential Jones opponents disheartened. After the fight Daniel Cormier, in the studio for Fox Sports 1 and a single fight away from a title shot, seemed downright depressed at the idea of trying to beat Jones. He tried to convince himself it was possible. Only he knows if he’s really buying it.
“I still want to fight him, and partly because I’m a man and want to be the best in the world. But Jon looked awesome tonight,” Cormier said on Fox Sports 1. “…I think what I have to do is impose my will on him. I have to press him against the cage and bully him. But I have to tell Jones that I’m a bigger man than him and put some doubt in him. I train harder than him with someone named Cain Velasquez. I have to go and fight into that style.”
Jones, in that cocky style that one day I hope he wakes up and owns instead of runs from, told Cormier he should concentrate on the business at hand. Phil Davis had looked past an opponent right in front of him to peer at Jones from a distance. That hadn’t gone so well.
For Jones, at this point, the opponent is almost immaterial. He’s battling for his place in history. Not just MMA history—sports history. We’re watching one of the best athletes of all time compete at the highest level at his absolute physical and mental prime. And, scarily enough for Cormier and other potential foes, he’s only getting better.
“I do have a lot of great gifts. You have to be smart. You have to have a great work ethic,” Jones admitted to Fox Sports 1 after the fight. “One thing you have to have is a chin. I realized I have a chin. I caught some uppercuts and some left hooks. I’m blessed to prove I can fight at close range. A lot of people believe that to beat me you have to get inside. Today I threw more elbows standing than ever. I’m closing up the holes in my game – jiu-jitsu, takedown defense, takedowns, close-range fighting. I believe I’ll be champion for a long time.”
I believe he’s right.
I never saw “Sugar” Ray Robinson at his best. Ali was a shell of himself as I watched him struggle through the worst years of his professional life. I only know of Willie Mays through words on paper. But I’ve seen Jon Jones from the beginning.
Enjoy him while you can. There will never be another.
It doesn’t take long when you sit down for your first Jon Jones fight to realize he’s a little bit different than your average UFC fighter. While others mean-mug, flex, scream and smirk their way into the cage, Jones chooses a simple, yet decidedly unm…
It doesn’t take long when you sit down for your first Jon Jones fight to realize he’s a little bit different than your average UFC fighter. While others mean-mug, flex, scream and smirk their way into the cage, Jones chooses a simple, yet decidedly unmasculine, cartwheel.
At first glance, it seems soft. You might ask yourself: What’s wrong with this guy? Does he even want to bang? Is this a fight or a gymnastics recital?
Of course, when you think about it a bit, it’s the most primal entrance of all. Jones is laying out to the world, and especially his opponent, the very attributes that make him special. From fingertip to toes, his enormous wingspan and height advantage are displayed with an arrogance so subtle and blase that we don’t even question it anymore.
It’s this reach, a physical gift Jones uses to his utmost advantage, that has allowed the champion to win seven consecutive UFC title fights. Jones, simply put, can reach out and touch his opponent with his feet and his hands while his foe is still swinging at nothing but air.
As you can imagine, this works to Jones’ advantage. He dictates where he and his opponent are going to engage. If an opponent, like Saturday’s victim Glover Teixeira, is able to get inside and muscle Jones up against the cage, he has some tricks up his sleeve there too, most impressively a pair of razor-sharp elbows and a host of judo- and Greco Roman-inspired trips and takedowns. And if an opponent is going to shoot for a takedown of his own, he better not miss. Jones’ guillotine choke is deadly.
And if he ends up on top of you?
His ground-and-pound is the best the sport has ever seen, elbows coming so hard and fast that sometimes even he can’t quite control the carnage.
With each subsequent fight, they disappear as Jones soaks in knowledge and experience. As Sports On Earth’s Tomas Rios writes, it’s hard to even find a weakness to begin game-planning against:
Step inside the pocket and he stakes out precise obtuse and acute angles that align with his optimal striking range. Sit back on a counter and Jones’ sense of distance and timing is enhanced by his unmatched range. Move in for a takedown and finish on the ass-end of a physics equation that ends with the mean man beating you down. Jones does everything so well that strategizing against him begins with realizing there isn’t even an obvious starting point.
Unfortunately for Jones and the UFC, which has lost its three biggest pay-per-view stars to retirement and injury, Jones’ undeniable excellence in the cage hasn’t translated at the box office. He’s still a big star, one of the few capable of headlining a show without a strong co-main event. But no one will mistake his drawing power with that of Chuck Liddell, Brock Lesnar or Georges St-Pierre.
Jones remains a mystery to most MMA fans. While some journalists like Bleacher Report’s Jeremy Botter have shown us glimpses of Jones’ life, none have shown us the man. He’s still opaque, something MMA Fighting’s Chuck Mindenhall believes fans have a hard time with in a sport so accustomed to unprecedented access and availability:
Which in a roundabout way gets to the real storyline of any Jon Jones fight for the last couple of years: Perception. Just who is Jon Jones? Talk about a polarizing figure. We love Jones, we hate him, we love to hate him, and, most frustrating of all for his growing base of haters, there’s no denying him in the one domain that matters most — fighting.
It’s become clear, he says, that Jones can’t really worry about how fans feel.
“I’ve gotten to the point now where I realize I’m not going to be a fan-favorite, and being loved isn’t necessarily – it doesn’t have to be,” Jones told MMA Junkie’s John Morgan. “Muhammad Ali was hated, and then he was loved at the very end. Floyd Mayweather was hated, and a lot of people are really coming around on him. So I’m just remaining positive and trying not to offend too many people along this way.”
In some ways, though, the champ has only himself to blame. Jones has never let anyone in, which has left fans cold to his carefully managed stage persona. What he lacks, in a word, is authenticity. The straight-laced image he tries to desperately court sponsors with falls away the moment he is handed a live microphone, asked a straightforward question or handed the keys to his own social media account.
Last week, Jones hit the headlines for allegedly directing homophobic insults at a fan taunting him on Instagram. As usual in these things, the coverup became much worse than the original offense. Whether his phone was lost, hacked or hijacked by rogue members of his social media team, we may never know. But his credibility took a major hit simply because his story shifted so dramatically over time.
It’s honestly a shame Jones can’t seem to pull it together. Still just 26 years old, he is already the best fighter this sport has ever seen. Even the power of nostalgia isn’t strong enough to convince anyone that Chuck Liddell had more than a puncher’s chance in his prime. Jones is so good—scary good—that it makes the idea of anyone beating him on his best day feel slightly ludicrous.
Like it or not, mixed martial arts is still on very shaky ground in the United States. While it certainly appears it can be a cable staple for years to come, this sport’s mainstream history is being written right now. Jones owes promoters, fans and himself more. He is, for better or worse, our best ambassador to the outside world.
For years, it was relatively easy to pinpoint the best fighter in mixed martial arts. Depending on your stylistic or aesthetic biases, it was bound to be one of two men.