Category Archives: Rankings

Amateur Rankings Coming to the Northeast!

I talked to Rick about the possibility of Amateur Rankings on the site. With all the fight promotions locally there is a show almost every week all year long. Every show out there now are predominantly Amateur with maybe 5 pro fights rounding out the main card. How is it that we have pro rankings but not amateur? They work just as hard and they consume more of the fighting around here than the pro’s! My idea behind this is to create goals for amateurs, instill a certain criteria for what a pro MMA athlete really is in this area. Further segregating the amateurs from Pro’s , Make life easier for matchmakers and more importantly give these amateurs some credibility. An Amateur isn’t the void between “I Trane UFC” and a real professional MMA fighter. These fighters are legit and more importantly “doing it right”. I wish I had the opportunity to go amateur first and build my confidence prior to my pro debut. I admire these guys and I think ranking them in their respected weights is a compliment to their work.
Now, Keep in mind this is the first ever time we have attempted to rank amateurs in the area. Most amateurs do not have lengthy extensive careers so most fighters will have between 3 and 6 fights before moving onto pro. The first set of rankings will be official but based on the knowledge of all the local promoters with amateurs on their shows. I have asked the help of Karyn Wesch (Premier FC), Mark Vaz (AFO), Mike Strazzere (TOC), Myself (GFL), Mike Polvere (Cage Titans), Dave George (Combat Zone), Gary Foreman (CageFX), Jeremy Reipold (western Mass MMA), Mark Hoxie (Northeastmma Writer). This group has the best look at the amateur fighters in the Northeast and will compile the rankings for the first time. Rankings will be up at the end of the week.

Criteria: Wins, wins over top fighters, strength of opponents, Activity

These will likely change a bunch before the final rankings are released, but before we rack our brains wrapping them up, I wanted to let you guys throw your two cents in. I’m sure we missed a few guys, so take this opportunity to tell us who we missed!

Some things have changed since the preliminary rankings. Some guys had some big wins, and other guys changed weight classes. Check ‘em out and voice your opinion.

I decided to take someone’s advice recently and post “preliminary” rankings, and let you guys pick them apart, then I’ll release official rankings next week. We always seem to miss a guy or two, or forget about a big win one guy had or something like that. So please take a look  at the guys listed below and let me know what you guys think.

As always, the rankings take into account what guys have done, not what we think they can do…so if there is a guy who is 2-0 that hasn’t beaten anyone tough yet, but we know he’s a killer and could likely beat a ranked fighter, he stays off the rankings until he does. We also give much more credit for a win than we punish guys for losses. The example I’ll use is Dennis Olson. He had been on a tear lately up until losing at Bellator. However, the fight was at 185 and on short notice, so I have a hard time dropping him down the list. Had he lost to another fighter ranked below him, sure…that fighter would have jumped over Dennis, but that wasn’t the case.

Please ask any and ll questions, and please throw out names I may have accidentally left out and we’ll take into account your opinions before releasing final rankings.

It’s been about 6 months since we released fighter rankings, and I’m sure there will be some surprises in this one. To start, some of the usual names are gone…either because they are under contract with a national show, or because they haven’t competed in a while. We’re constantly updating the way we do these rankings, and we decided that we’re not going to rank fighters as soon as we know they aren’t available to fight locally. So instead of waiting for guys to make their UFC/WEC debut before we remove them, as soon as we know they have a UFC/WEC fight signed, they come off the rankings…so guys like Will Kerr and Ricardo Funch have been removed.

Also, if guys haven’t been fighting often, we’ve pulled them off as well. 1 year is going to be our rough guide line, but it is just that, a guide line. So in some cases, guys haven’t fought in 14 months, but they have lost out on fights because of injuries, or something like that, we may leave them on. In other cases, If a guy hasn’t fought in something like 10 months, but hadn’t fought for another year prior to that, we may pull them prior to 12 months. As always, we put more stock into the wins than the losses. The reason for that, if two fighters are 4-0, and one of the 2 takes a tough fight and loses, we don’t want them to drop because they took a tough fight.

Oh, and we added a 135 pound division and seperated the 135ers from the 145ers.

Without further ado:

It was a very busy four months for some weight classes, and very…very slow for other weight classes. There was a ton of changes to 145, 155 and 170, but 185 and 205 were nearly dormant. Only a couple ranked fighters fought at 185 and 205, thus only slight movement. I’m sure there will be questions, so feel free to ask in the comment section and we’ll do our best to answer them.