FanHouse MMA Rankings

Two days ago, I don't think anyone had Jose Aldo listed as one of the top 10 pound-for-pound fighters in mixed martial arts. But after what Aldo did to Mike Brown on Wednesday night, I don't think there's any way to exclude him.

Wednesday night's WEC 44 event is a featherweight showcase, headlined by Mike Brown defending his 145-pound title against Jose Aldo.

But the WEC's bantamweight division, which won't be represented in any of Wednesday night's live fights on Versus, might be even more stacked than the featherweight division. My list of the Top 10 bantamweights in MMA is topped by six WEC fighters, with champion Brian Bowles and former champion Miguel Torres clearly the class of the division.

A couple of Shooto fighters make my list, as does Dream's Bibiano Fernandes (whom I consider a bantamweight even though he's the promotion's featherweight champ), but there's no question that at the top, the division is dominated by the WEC.

November has been an odd month for middleweights.

The UFC's middleweight division is basically taking the month off, with the undisputed No. 1 middleweight in the world, UFC champion Anderson Silva, nursing an elbow injury and hinting that he doesn't think any of the UFC's other top middleweights are worthy opponents.

Meanwhile, two big middleweight fights happened in other promotions, but they didn't quite go according to plan: Jake Shields beat Jason "Mayhem" Miller to win the Strikeforce middleweight title in a fight that left the crowd booing, while Mamed Khalidov shocked Sengoku middleweight champion Jorge Santiago.

And the guy who's probably the best middleweight after Silva -- Dan Henderson -- doesn't have a contract at the moment and isn't sure if he'll be fighting for the UFC or Strikeforce in 2010. So my list of the Top 10 middleweights in MMA shows a division in flux.

The lightweight division in mixed martial arts consists of B.J. Penn and everyone else.

We all know that Penn, the UFC champion, has established himself as the top lightweight in the sport. But after Penn, there are about a dozen guys who are practically interchangeable. That list includes UFC fighters like Penn's next opponent (Diego Sanchez), his last opponent (Kenny Florian), and some past and future UFC opponents like Gray Maynard, Frank Edgar and Sean Sherk.

Fedor Emelianenko demonstrated once again last weekend that he is the best heavyweight in mixed martial arts, beating a game Brett Rogers by second-round TKO on CBS.

Meanwhile, the UFC's heavyweight division is reeling: Champion Brock Lesnar is battling a serious illness, No. 1 contender Shane Carwin is recovering from a knee injury, and Antonio Rodrigo Nogueira is suffering from staph infection. So while the UFC still has most of the Top 10 heavyweights in MMA, Dana White can't feel great about the heavyweight division right now.

My rankings are below.

Lyoto Machida is still the light heavyweight champion of the UFC, but not many people agree with the three judges who allowed him to keep his belt after 25 minutes in the Octagon with Shogun Rua on Saturday night.

So does Machida keep his status as the top light heavyweight in MMA in my latest Top 10? He does, but Shogun also moves up in the rankings after a very close fight with the champ. The full rankings are below.

I don't think we've all given enough credit to Thiago Silva.

To review, Silva is 14-1 in his MMA career, and the only loss is to the undefeated undisputed champion of the light heavyweight division, Lyoto Machida. Of Silva's 14 wins, he's finished 10 opponents in the first round, the most recent of which was Keith Jardine Saturday night at UFC 102.

And yet the UFC's light heavyweight division is so stacked that on my list of the Top 10 light heavyweights in MMA, there are eight UFC fighters ahead of Silva. The full list is below.

Antonio Rodrigo Nogueira and Randy Couture are both old and past their primes. But even old and past their primes, Nogueira and Couture are plenty good.

After their epic battle on Saturday night, which Nogueira won by unanimous decision, I consider both Couture and Nogueira to be among the Top 5 heavyweights in mixed martial arts. But at the same time, I think there's a pretty big gap between the Top 2 heavyweights in MMA -- Brock Lesnar and Fedor Emelianenko -- and everyone else.

So as I go through my new list of the Top 10 heavyweights in MMA, I mean no disrespect to Couture and Nogueira even as I say they're not close to the best.

In B.J. Penn's seven fights since returning to the UFC in 2006, he's 4-3. That record doesn't even come close to telling the story of Penn, the most dominant lightweight fighter in MMA history.

World Extreme Cagefighting is home to the best featherweights in MMA. Mike Brown is the undisputed champion of the world, he should have a great fight with Jose Aldo late this year, and Urijah Faber, the man Brown beat twice, is still probably the WEC's biggest draw.

But there's one problem with the WEC's featherweights: They're not doing enough to promote Wagnney Fabiano. You could make a case that Fabiano is more deserving of a title shot against Brown than Aldo is, and Fabiano certainly deserves to be heavily promoted as a future title contender. Instead, Fabiano's fight with Erik Koch next month isn't even on the live TV portion of the card.