The UFC CEO made it clear that any new ranking system he sorts out won’t be run by him or any other UFC exec or matchmaker.
Dana White has expanded on his desire to completely overhaul the UFC’s ranking system after the past few weeks’ updates underscored serious flaws in the current system’s design.
The worst instance of rankings malfeasance in our opinion came after No. 11 ranked lightweight Renato Moicano beat No. 12 ranked Benoit Saint-Denis in the main event of UFC Paris. Despite delivering a beatdown on Saint-Denis, Moicano remained at the same rank. So did Saint-Denis. How?!
The breaking point for White came after UFC 307, which saw Khalil Rountree deliver a gutsy but ultimately losing performance against light heavyweight champion Alex Pereira. For that, Khalil didn’t move in the rankings either. He remained No. 8 at 205 pounds, which was crazy to White.
“He was ahead on the scorecards, stayed in the pocket, put on one of the greatest fights anybody’s ever seen, and he stays at No. 8,” White said after last night’s Contender Series event. “I can’t handle incompetence. I can’t take it anymore. It’s driving me crazy.”
“I can’t let people that I don’t believe know what the f— they’re talking about deal with the rankings any more. I just can’t do it. I have to figure out a solution. Tomorrow I have a meeting with a group of people that are coming to me saying they have the solution to this problem. And God I hope they’re right, because I’m gonna change it.”
White got pretty heated as he discussed the Rountree situation before clarifying his emotional reaction.
“It’s not that I’m upset. It’s at the point where, ‘Hey, Dana, shut the f— up and fix it. Stop bitching about it and fix it.’ That’s it. So we’re gonna figure this thing out and the media will not control the rankings anymore.”
So who will? The UFC?
“There should never be a scenario where we are personally controlling the rankings,” White said. “Can’t happen. You have to have another system in there … at the end of the day, I make make fights that people wanna see anyway. But I believe that I should not be the one controlling the rankings.”
“I’ll be honest with you: there are some fighters I don’t like. There’s fighters that I really like. And there’s things that are good for the business. There’s things — I don’t want in our hands at all. Not mine, not Sean [Shelby]’s, not Mick [Maynard]’s, not Hunter [Campbell]’s, nobody’s. There has to be a third party or A.I. or something that [can do] the rankings. It’s impossible not to be biased.”
White has previously suggested that A.I. could be answer to this problem, but anyone who’s spent any time kicking the tires on ChatGPT and other major A.I. tools will tell you they’re about as accurate as your twelve year old cousin who got into MMA thanks to Jake Paul. A.I. doesn’t watch the fights. It just digests a dog’s breakfast of hot takes from the internet and vomits out an auto-complete ad-lib it thinks you’ll like.
FYI @danawhite this is why you hate the rankings. There’s maybe one nearly credible source on this list of people who make the UFC rankings. pic.twitter.com/uBjvraeWmx
— The Spear Media (@SpearWrestling) October 16, 2024
A.I. has famously told people that glue is a good pizza topping and eating rocks is good for you. Apparently, those ideas came from jokes scraped off Reddit. Imagine what will come if A.I. is used for rankings? Can we expect Artem Lobov to blast back into the pound-for-pound top five? Hey, if he does, you can always just ask A.I. to generate the list again and it will give you a completely different answer.
Sure, that’s general-use artificial intelligence. But we have a hard time imagining any computer system that could accurately handle rankings without a whole lot of human input, and then we’re back to the same problem of bias that White believes is causing problems with the current system.
In our opinion, the current system is broken because the UFC has let it break down. The panel providing rankings is a D-list of radio stations and fringe websites from 2013 when the rankings first debuted. Ditch the current panel and replace it with a whole new panel. Even better, help form an association that provides an open set of criteria and oversees membership in the panel. It’s time for the Top Turtle Podcast and CFMU 93.3 to go.