Jun 7, 20204 min read

NEMMA Summer 2020 Rankings

Updated: Oct 14, 2020

When Travis, Steve, and I started this endeavor many months ago, one thing that was very important to us all was creating an unbiased, credible ranking system for the fighters in New England. It's been many years since there was an attempt to put rankings together, and outside of an algorithm based rankings system by a national site, there wasn't anything that fans, fighters, and promoters could use to help match and promote fights. This is our attempt at filling that gap. It's not perfect, and it's a work in progress, but we are proud of this first run and what it produced. We feel that they're pretty accurate, but there will always be debate when it comes to rankings. We welcome the debate, and look forward to making our rankings a staple of the New England MMA landscape for many years to come.

So who's input did we get?

The Fans

In order to get the most accurate rankings possible you need to have a number of opinions melded as one, and that's what our formula is based around. As you may have seen, we have a page on our site where you can vote on all 18 different weight classes (pro and amateur) - ranking fighters 1-10.

Some fighters may show up in multiple weight classes due to activity within both divisions. In terms of being eligible for the voting, we've settled on requiring a fighter to have had a MMA bout within the past 18 months. They also must have fought for one of the 9 New England promotions during that time. If a fighter is active with a major promotion (UFC, Bellator, PFL), then they will not being included in the rankings. If they are cut from said promotion, then they'll be eligible once they've entered the cage for one of the New England regional promotions.

The Promotions & Media

If you want accurate rankings, then you need to poll the most knowledgable people when it comes to the sport within our region. The promoters and media members should have an unbiased opinion of fighters when it comes to rankings. We had a dozen promoters, matchmakers, and media members submit a ballot for our Summer rankings! We are grateful for their participation, and are pretty excited about how these turned out!

The Formula

We feel that it's important to have these rankings be as interactive as possible, and the main reason we decided to launch the fan voting section of the website. Having the fans, promoters, matchmakers, and media members opinions on this topic is critically important to producing accurate rankings. I can assure you, that this was the most detailed and in-depth analysis of people's opinions when it came to the rankings! We would challenge anyone to dispute the amount of time, effort, and data that went into these, and the results have produced, in our opinion, the most accurate New England MMA rankings we've seen to date.

To calculate the final numbers, we incorporate 20% of the fan vote, 40% of the media vote, and 40% of the promoter vote. We've limited the emphasis that the fan vote has on the rankings in order to temper the popularity contest that naturally exists out there. In short, we have opinions on these rankings from the most knowledgable people in our sport in New England.

Enough foreplay. Let's get into it and see the peking order of every weight division - professional and amateur! We'll highlight the top 3 fighters in each weight division below.

You can view the full rankings HERE.

You can jump into the rankings discussion in our forum HERE