FanHouse Marlon Sandro

Wednesday night's Jose Aldo vs. Mike Brown fight shook up the featherweight division in mixed martial arts. When I interviewed Brown last week it looked like he was close to clearing out the featherweight division, but now that Aldo is the World Extreme Cagefighting featherweight champion, the division is a lot more interesting.

Who will get the first shot at Aldo's title? I think it'll be the winner of the WEC 46 bout between Urijah Faber and Rafael Assuncao, and I think Manny Gamburyan's win over Leonard Garcia on Wednesday night makes him a player in the featherweight division, too.

My featherweight rankings are below.

It was the YouTube highlight that put the upstart Bellator Fighting Championships on the map, and it was an easy choice for our MMA Submission of the Half Year: Toby Imada choking out Jorge Masvidal with an inverted triangle.

On today's conference call to promote WEC 41, World Extreme Cagefighting featherweight champion Mike Brown and former champ Urijah Faber both insisted that they don't care about rankings. And for the two of them, that makes sense: They're fighting on June 7, and whoever wins is, without a doubt, the No. 1 featherweight in MMA. But rankings are still fun for fans and useful for identifying the top fighters in the rest of the featherweight division, and my own featherweight Top 10 is below.

Featherweights Hatsu Hioki and Marlon Sandro both looked impressive in winning fights early Saturday at the Sengoku 8 event in Japan, and as a result both remain in the list of the Top 10 featherweights in MMA. Hioki needed just 3:09 to submit Ronnie Mann, while Sandro needed just 19 seconds to knock out Nick Denis. The full Top 10 list is below.

Now is a great time to be a fan of small fighters. We just witnessed the best bantamweight card ever at WEC 40, and my list of the Top 10 featherweights in MMA features a whole lot of guys who either won over the weekend or are about to get big tests.