Reddit user exposes UFC rankings system

A Reddit user has dug deep into the UFC rankings, and has exposed a flawed system that features a number of panelists who do not actually even cover MMA.

Reddit user u/kneeco28 posted an in-depth rundown of all 14 panelists on the UFC rankings panel. What he found was that a third of the panelists are not even active MMA media members. Remember, these are the same people who contribute to the rankings, which have an inexorable impact on fighter promotion, matchmaking, salaries and Reebok pay.

Read the Reddit post in full here.

“Looking at them one by one, in my opinion, 5 of the 14 cannot be considered to be in MMA media at all at this junction. I tried to use the broadest possible definition and still over a third of the people ranking the fighters are not, in 2019, in mma media. When you pair that with the fact that their impact is already out of whack of what the UFC suggested it would be (each is one of 14 rather than one of 90), this is just insanity.”

One of the best examples of the UFC rankings system being broken is by looking at voter Romain Cadot. Take a look at what the Reddit user found.

“Romain Cadot, per LinkedIn, is apparently the editor-in-chief of vladusport.fr. Here’s the thing: Vladusport.fr doesn’t exist. If you go there, it’s just some online shopping thing squatting in the space. According to their Facebook page, they haven’t existed in over 4 years. The newest post there is from April 2015 which asks for a bit of patience before the return of the site. They similarly have a YouTube channel that hasn’t released a video since the 2015 teaser of the site’s return. The website’s twitter hasn’t tweeted since 2013 and the tweets that are there link to articles that are no longer on the web. Again, 14 people yield this power of fighters’ careers. This is one of them. The website hasn’t existed in almost 5 years.”

The user looked into all the panelists closely. Of the 14 panelists, the ones who are active MMA media members are: Brian Hemminger, Andreas Hale, Steve Jeffrey, Bruno Massami, Jeff Cain, Rob DeMello, Steve Juon, Ken Pishna and Ariel Shnerer.

The rankings panelists who are not active MMA media members are: David Brown, Romain Cadot, Grant Gordon and Christoffer Esping. Eddie Pappani is on the bubble between the two.

It seems utterly preposterous that UFC fighters and the money they make are directly linked to to whims and opinions of just 14 people — only nine of whom can actually call themselves active media members. The UFC regularly justifies their fight bookings by where the fighters sit in the rankings, and now we know that not every ranker is actually even closely affiliated with the sport.

The UFC rankings system has been exposed, and at this point fans, active media members and the fighters want answers as to why this has happened.

What do you think the UFC can do to fix a rankings system that is obviously broken?