I did a thread on the UFC's rankings back in 2020 and this is what I found:
-More than half of the media members don't have a primary focus on MMA.
-One third of the media members don't cover sports.
-Several media members had their domain names for sale.
-Most of the media members were nothing more than Facebook/Instagram pages.
https://forums.sherdog.com/threads/presenting-the-people-who-vote-on-the-ufcs-rankings.4149746/
One of these media members exposed how the UFC tells the panelists how they should vote:
Credit to
@dildos for finding the post on Twitter.
https://forums.sherdog.com/posts/162823374/
This has nothing to do with the UFC. This is the brief from the organizer of the panel. Read this article. They go in depth about the flaws of the system. They have these guidelines so people just don't randomly vote for their favorite fighter as number 1. In Burgo's case he was going to drop with a loss. You are arguing over rank 12 vs rank 14.
https://www.mmafighting.com/2020/7/...nel-a-closer-look-at-the-ufcs-rankings-system
"It was Jenness who reached out to media members in January to expand the panel from 14 members to 22. When the rankings started in 2013, it was the UFC that handled recruiting panelists both directly and through an application on its website, with FightMetric (now known as
UFC Stats) handling the polling.
Asked directly about the UFC’s level of involvement today, Jenness answered that the promotion does not directly influence the rankings.
“The UFC is hands off,” Jenness said via e-mail. “Myself and my partner Chris Palmquist reach out to them on an ongoing but infrequent basis with relevant questions, like for example, ‘Is fighter X staying in this division or is it a one-off?’ I wouldn’t describe which fighters are eligible and in which class as a decision. If a fighter is contracted with the UFC, and fights in a division, he or she is eligible for ranking.
“I want to state unambiguously that the UFC has never reached out in any way, either directly or subtly, about any direction they want a ranking to go. It’s like a live rail — they don’t touch it. There is no oversight or editorial input whatsoever, ever. I say this on my mother’s life. Further, the software is mine, and sits on my server. No one in the UFC has access to it. They couldn’t tweak the figures if they wanted to. And they very, very, very much don’t want to. They want a ranking that mathematically reflects the honest opinion of the panel members, and they get it.”"
