Our MMA rankings week 38 update was calculated on September 20 and compares against September 13, so it is the first to absorb UFC 331 in full. Eight fighters gained ground. The largest single move belongs to a man who had lost four in a row, and the most consequential puts Arman Tsarukyan at 94 out of 100, second in a division whose champion will not say his name.
Key takeaways
- Eight fighters gained rating points between September 13 and September 20, and the five clearest movements all came off the UFC 331 card in Los Angeles.
- Marlon Vera posted the biggest single gain of the week at four points, reaching 74 and 20th at bantamweight after stopping Charles Jourdain in the third round.
- Arman Tsarukyan rose to 94 and second at lightweight, three points behind Justin Gaethje, while Joshua Van took over the top of our flyweight list at 86.
MMA rankings week 38: what actually moved
How the number is built, in one sentence
Our rating is a global Glicko-2 run over results, weighted by the quality of the opponent and by how recent the fight is, then expressed on a 0 to 100 scale. It does not care which promotion issued the press release, and it does not care about the order in which a matchmaker stacked a card.
The five movements with a cause you can point at
Marlon Vera, plus four points, now 74 and 20th at bantamweight. The biggest gain of the week, and the least surprising once you look at what the model punishes: he had spent a year losing to better-rated opponents, and a third-round stoppage of Charles Jourdain repaid a large part of it at once.
Casey O’Neill, plus three, now 66 and 15th at flyweight. A performance bonus on the same card, which is a proxy the rating does not read, but the result underneath it is one it does.
Alonzo Menifield, plus three, now 75 and 13th at light heavyweight. A split decision over Iwo Baraniewski, taken while fighting on a broken thumb according to several reports. The model scores the win, not the circumstances, and the win was enough.
Joshua Van, plus three, now 86 and first at flyweight. Five rounds against a former champion is the single most expensive thing you can buy in this system, and he bought it.
Arman Tsarukyan, plus two, now 94 and second at lightweight. The smallest gain on this list and the most significant, because at that altitude points get very hard to add.
What our ranking says that the official lists do not
Three names no official top ten can contain
Our featherweight top five has Movlid Khaybulaev third at 89 and Timur Khizriev fifth at 87. Our flyweight top three has Kyoji Horiguchi at 81. Our lightweight top eight has Salahdine Parnasse at 84. None of those four can appear in a UFC ranking, because a UFC ranking only ranks people under contract to the UFC. Ours ranks the sport.
Why that is a difference in kind, not in taste
An official list answers a question about a roster. A rating answers a question about results. When a fighter beats strong opposition somewhere else, the promotional ranking has no mechanism to notice and ours has no mechanism to ignore it. That is the entire gap, and it is why a cross-promotional number tends to look strange for about a year and then look obvious.
The lightweight case, in numbers
Justin Gaethje sits at 97, Tsarukyan at 94, Ilia Topuria at 92. Three points is close, and it is the kind of margin that a single result closes. That is worth holding next to a week in which the contender spent a press conference saying the champion will not name him.
He never says my name, so he's scared. He's trying to avoid me.
The rest of the board, and where the number stops
Pound for pound, and the flyweight handover
Islam Makhachev leads our men’s pound-for-pound list at 99, ahead of Alexander Volkanovski at 96 and Gaethje at 95. At flyweight, Joshua Van moved up one place to first at 86, with Alexandre Pantoja slipping to fifth at 78 after the title fight, a reminder that this scale moves in both directions even when we only put the upward half in the window.
What the rating is not
It is a measure of what has been proven, not a forecast. The engine can compute a win probability and we do not publish one, because a number that predicts a fight is a different product from a number that describes a career. This ranking describes careers.
See the full board
Every division, the pound-for-pound list, the all-time tables and each fighter’s own rating are in the FightHub app, updated with the same calculation that produced this article. Download it to see where your division stands.
- Charles Jourdain lost his eyesight in the third round, and stopped his own fight
- Tsarukyan vs Gaethje: twelve months of waiting, one first-round knockout, and a champion who will not say his name
- Topuria accuses Gaethje of cheating with his gloves, and Gaethje calls it a lame excuse
- Arman Tsarukyan vs Mauricio Ruffy: a title shot, and the one way to beat the knockout artist
