The post-UFC 314 rankings are in! And boy have they ticked off the fans. Alexander Volkanovski, of course, became featherweight champ after beating Diego Lopes, who was ranked #3 going into their UFC 314 fight on Saturday. And despite this loss, the Brazilian dynamo has actually risen in the rankings to become #2, behind only Max Holloway, who isn’t even a featherweight anymore. Also on the list, ranked #3 is former champion Ilia Topuria, who, like Holloway, has moved up to 155lbs for good. Yair Rodriguez, who absolutely demolished Bellator GOAT, Patricio Pitbull, at UFC 314 rose one place to tie Movsar Evloev for #4.

MMA math is unpredictable but this math right here doesn’t make sense at all! Two of the top five in the form of Holloway and Topuria are no longer even in the division anymore, while the undefeated Evloev, who is coming off a win over a former champ is sharing his #4 spot with Rodriguez, who beat an unranked debutante. So you can see that there is plenty there for fans to be ticked off by. Of course, Dana White has long been a critic of the rankings system and has partnered with Mark Zuckerberg-led Meta (whose board he sits on) to come up with an AI based ranking system.

“We’ve already started to work on some innovations with Meta around a new fighter rankings system that will debut later this year. Thank God,” White said in a video on his Instagram earlier this month.

And while this announcement had not been met with much enthusiasm by fans at first, at least a few UFC fans are coming around to the idea after seeing these rankings. Fans, as usual, took to social media to excoriate these rankings and give their thoughts on the upcoming UFC-Meta rankings system.

Fans react to post-UFC 314 featherweight rankings

One fan felt that Bryce Mitchell, who had gone from being ranked #13 before UFC 314 to being unranked after losing the bout to Jean Silva in dominant fashion, at least deserves to be ranked #15 in the division: “Bryce Mitchell should be ranked for sure”. Another fan was one of those who came around to the idea of AI-based rankings after seeing the post-UFC 314 featherweight rankings: “Wasn’t a fan of the AI rankings idea but after seeing this maybe we give it a shot f–k it”.

However, another fan totally disagreed with this take. They were far less optimistic at the prospect of rankings being done by an AI model and felt that it might just make these rankings even worse: “Can’t wait to see how bad AI makes it”. One fan found it absurd that Ilia Topuria and Max Holloway were still ranked in the division despite changing weight classes: And why did they drop Ilia to number 3 contender when he just vacated.”

Forget the absurdity of Holloway and Topuria being ranked in the top five despite having changed weight classes. Another fan pointed out the absurdity of Topuria, who sent Max Holloway to the shadow realm in their UFC 308 clash, being ranked lower than ‘Blessed’: “Ilia clearly knocked tf out of Holloway 🤓”

One helpful fan, however, explained that a fighter changing weight classes doesn’t actually officially lose their ranking until they fight in the new weight class, which is why ‘Blessed’ and ‘La Leyenda’ were still ranked at 145: “like every other time, if a fighter moves up a weight class they only get unlisted when they fight at the new weight”. 

What do you think about UFC partnering with Meta to come up with an AI-based UFC rankings system?