I think a lot of what motivates your sense of rankings, and I say this with no disrespect, is that you work under the philosophy that a certain rank limits someone's opportunities, particularly title shots. To me those are separate decisions. #2 does not have to face the champ automatically. Rankings, imo, should serve as a guideline for tourneys, championship fights and general match-ups and reflect the achievements of fighters at any given point. This philosophy frees me to simply examine what has been happening for each fighter within a time range (I keep a cutoff point that the algo doesn't go back any further).
I'll throw my 2 cents in here. I have to disagree whole-heartedly on your rankings rationale. IMO by far the greatest benefit in achieving a good algorithm is that it will neutrally determine matchups. If the algorithm is good enough to accurately reflect the achievements of fighters, it's good enough to determine who they fight. Otherwise, what are the achievements for? Why should any fighter go into a fight not knowing how much closer the bout brings him to a title fight?
I do understand you're not the biggest fan of title-based MMA and prefer tournaments. I'm okay with either, so long as they're approached correctly. And the way to approach them correctly is by having an impersonal method of determining who fights who. This method is what a rankings algorithm should serve. Otherwise, we're just playing with numbers for the sake of it. If you believe in your algorithm, you should believe in its power to match up fighters based on justice.
What are 90% of thread topics about whenever a new, significant matchup is announced? About whether the fight is justifiable based on accomplishments. If the algorithm is good, it should tell us who deserves what.
As for Ben, his win over Alistair and the chain of wins of Alistair and his opponents had created Ben's opportunity to rise in the ranks. He goes ahead of Cain because Ben has a greater point total for the time period and in reality, I broke my own rule because Cain has been SO inactive that technically he doesn't even qualify to be ranked. I put him in and shared this with everyone because I am at a bit of a loss regarding how to handle this kind of inactivity. You have the former champ barely fighting to the point of not deserving to be ranked but if you lower the amount of qualified fights a guy needs to be ranked than you may very well get some very stupid fighters/can-crushers introduced into your rankings (which is a COMMON and a HORRIBLE mess that the vast majority of ranking sites out there have).
Heard! Totally agree with you---this is probably the biggest headache a rankings programmer can have. I don't think I have any big insights here. But let me try.
First, I think most will agree that the kind of uncertainty we're dealing with in Cain is different from the kind of uncertainty that we have with brand new fighters, guys fresh from the amateur/small promotion circuit. We know more about Cain that we do about someone newly signed, with 6 bouts under his belt, who has looked amazing but against limited competition.
But what exactly is the uncertainty with Cain? In his case, it isn't really ring rust IMO. With Cain, it's more about his injuries. The fact is, Cain is constantly hurt, and this should make us very hesitant to reinstate our full confidence in him as a fighter. It's much easier to have this confidence in a fighter whose layoff was due to contractual disputes, as opposed to injuries.
So this sets up the two main categories for inactivity: (1) injury based, and (2) contractual.
My thought has always been that long periods of inactivity don't demote a fighter's ranking, but rather, take him off the list entirely. Especially if the rankings are used to determine matchups, a long-dormant fighter can't retain a spot anywhere because it would affect the ability of other, lower-ranked fighters to get closer to their title shots.
If we take a fighter off the list, the question obviously becomes where to reinstate him on the list when he comes back. I think we can put him right where he was if his inactivity was contractually based. We have no reason to think him a lesser fighter unless such a long time has gone by that the game as a whole looks to have surpassed him. His accomplishments don't diminish, either.
The only exception to this would be if the fighter in question had a title shot coming when he dropped out. Since in the meantime someone else was probably given this shot, this reinstated fighter can't, if that bout is still upcoming, just take the contender's place. He should have to wait the results of the title bout and then fight the winner of it. If we aren't talking about title shot, then the reinstated fighter resumes his former ranking, displacing whoever happens to be in that spot.
If the layoff was injury-based, another set of considerations come into play. These considerations won't matter for short layoffs. Or maybe for anything up to a year. It's only when you have a fighter with extremely long layoffs that we should not allow him to retake his former ranking. And I think injury-based layoffs should affect our confidence in a fighter. To accept this reasoning, you have to be down with the idea that rankings aren't just about accomplishments, but confidence in the ability to perform. If it were only about accomplishments, then no one should ever be penalized in the rankings, no matter how much time he takes off. That to me just doesn't seem right.
So rankings have to reflect not just accomplishments, but expectations of performance. If you're ranked #3 in the division, you should be able to fight like it. All the more so if you're the champ. I'm among those who would be very skeptical of GSP reaching his former levels of performance if he were to come back in, say, June of this year. I simply don't have that confidence. He would need to establish himself again. To what extent, I'm not sure. I surely don't demote him out of the top 10. I would say top 5---but it's very debatable.
As for Cain? I have even less confidence in him than GSP at this point. He's just constantly hurt, and I have a lot of doubt that he can return to the level he was at when he was champ. I wouldn't have put him in a title rematch in the first place, after losing to Werdum. I'm very against instant rematches like that anyway.
At any rate, I don't think we can ever say the guy who just lost a title fight should be ranked out of the top 10. Neither should his injuries place him out of that range. What complicates my line of thought is that Cain's recent injury won't keep him out that long. 4 weeks, isn't it? But consider all the injuries he's had, and the cumulative amount of time he's had off because of those injuries. We can't possibly place the same faith in him that we had in him even AFTER the loss to Werdum. He's now not just the guy who lost to Werdum, but he's injured yet again!
Having said that, I can understand a rejection of this entire rationale of "confidence" in how we expect a fighter to perform. But as I said, a purely accomplishment-based rankings system seems unfair in some respects. So the problem is how to weigh time off in terms of a penalty. My (conjectured) solution involves the recognition of two categories of layoff: contractual and injury-based. Long amounts of time off, even contractually based, should come with a penalty because we're not sure how the fighter is keeping up with his skills, and so on. Long amounts of time off (whether linear or broken up over several instances) that involve injury should bring into play an extra penalty because the fighter has something to prove that he didn't before, namely that his body will perform as it did before the injury.
that my purely mathematical algo is giving me results that may not be exactly perfect in everyone's eyes, but pretty fucking close to what most humans believe is correct and there is ZERO massaging of the numbers to get there. Well, Cain's inactivity is a massaged but, honestly, after he pulled out of this last fight I'm not sure if anyone would have a problem with me taking him out of the rankings until he starts fighting regularly again.
