The UFC doesn’t have a rookie league, but it does have a couple of feeder leagues. These are MMA organizations that have partnered with the UFC and the UFC will, in turn, hire fighters who’ve fought in those organizations. The most popular feeder league is probably Invicta Fighting Championships, which is an all-women’s MMA organization. 698 Ufc jobs available on Indeed.com. Apply to Intern, Usher/ticket Taker, Executive Assistant and more!
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For a long time, UFC had no ranking system in place. Now, that it finally does, its ranking system is not so easy to understand. So, in this guide, we will explain in detail how do UFC rankings work.
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UFC rankings work in a way that media members rank who they feel are the top fighters in each weight class (except the champion), and also a combined pound-for-pound ranking group for the promotion’s champions and other top fighters.
The UFC rankings, which were introduced in February 2013, are generated by a voting panel made up of media members.
The media members are asked to vote for who they feel are the top fighters in the UFC by weight class and pound-for-pound. A fighter is only eligible to be voted on if they are in active status in the UFC. A fighter can appear in more than one weight division at a time.
The champion and interim champion are considered to be in the top positions of their respective divisions and therefore are not eligible for voting by weight class. However, the champions can be voted on for the pound-for-pound rankings.
Even thou we now have UFC rankings, people, fighters, and many media outlets are not really satisfied with its system.
The official UFC rankings are voted on by select members of the MMA media. Their votes are averaged and the rankings are determined on a weekly basis. These kinds of rankings are notorious for being biased, inconsistent, and often very bad.
Too many times, challengers are determined by fighters who make the most money for the organization or the ones that have the most impressive win streaks. If a champion and other high ranking fighter have match-up history, that other fighter is sometimes moved up to challenger position.
Unfortunately, we have seen many times in history, that challengers become fighters that bring the most money for the organization. Sometimes they are more popular and better outside the ring, then inside, but people love them, and they will pay more to watch them, thus the organization is forcing them in a better position than they really deserve.
Lucky for us MMA lovers, those popular fighters are not popular without reason, they are usually good fighters. So even thou they sometimes progressing in the ranks faster then they should because of their popularity, they usually give us a good fight for the money.
In short, the rankings are a helpful system to help fans keep track of who’s in the mix, but they’re ultimately subsidiary to the potential profitability of select UFC matchmaking. Luckily, if a fighter continues winning against high-level competition, they gain popularity and become more marketable. So the fighters with the most skill still end up getting the most opportunities. At least that’s how it mostly works.
Here is the official statement on how are UFC rankings determined (you can find it here).
Rankings were generated by a voting panel made up of media members. The media members were asked to vote for who they feel are the top fighters in the UFC by weight-class and pound-for-pound. A fighter is only eligible to be voted on if they are in active status in the UFC.
A fighter can appear in more than one weight division at a time. The champion and interim champion are considered to be in the top positions of their respective divisions and therefore are not eligible for voting by weight-class. However, the champions can be voted on for the pound-for-pound rankings.
There are eight UFC weight divisions in the current ranking system for male fighters and four divisions for female fighters.
There is also a UFC champion for each category and they have to fight to defend that title once they hold it.
The Strawweight is women’s only division, and women also fight in the Bantamweight division as well as more recently Flyweight and Featherweight. Men do not fight in the Strawweight division but compete in all other eight categories.
UFC divisions are:
We also have a whole article on UFC divisions that you can read more about.
Unfortunately, UFC isn’t particularly specified about who are the members that vote in UFC rankings. That as well is leading to people being angry with the organization about its fighters rankings.
MyMMANews, one of the voters in UFC rankings in the time of the writing, has an article about this particular topic.
They listed some journalists that, in that time, voted for UFC rankings, and also asked other MMA journalists to find out why they are not on the list.
In short, the answer they got was because those journalists worked for companies that didn’t want them to participate in the UFC ranking system. Those companies don’t like how UFC uses the rankings, to build fights, create pay structures, and other financial reasons.
Other journalists didn’t participate in the UFC ranking system due to the lack of transparency while ranking fighters.
UFC has an official list of media outlets who’s journalists are voting in UFC rankings and we are bringing you them here, with a few words about every one of them (we had to remove few because they don’t seem to be active anymore).
Media Outlets That Vote in UFC Rankings: