Life comes at you fast, so it helps to be able to see around corners. If you’re an MMA fan, consider this your mirror, which we then tied to a stick.
With that bit of eloquence, we kick off the second half of the third annual installment of the cornerstone piece of The Beaten Path, our ongoing series of articles and interviews highlighting top MMA prospects. For this list, we searched through hundreds of fighters to find the 25 up-and-comers who are poised to do big things on the sport’s grandest stages.
Last week, my man Riley Kontek published Part 1, listing No. 25-13. Now, I’m taking you through to the top.
The guidelines are pretty simple. No UFC fighters are eligible. Bellator and World Series of Fighting fighters are almost never included, and when they are, they are usually inexperienced in those promotions. All fighters are either young in age or in the sport—a particularly important rule, given that plenty of fighters find MMA later in their athletic lives (see Daniel Cormier or Holly Holm, for example).
Finally, if the fighter has been included on a previous list, he or she is no longer eligible. So check our 2013 and 2014 (both parts) rankings before you go bellyaching about so-and-so not being on here.
Fighters are ranked based on their records, their readiness to advance to the next level and our perceptions regarding their chances to continue their success once they reach said level.
OK? Sound good? Let’s get it on.