Wins over Pettis, Conor, Gaethe, Alvarez, Hooker, Holloway and 4 more wins over top 10 Green, Duffy Medeiros and Fereira.
#14
I have sth like this proabably missing someone
- Khabib
- Frankie
- Alvarez
- Charles
- Tony
- Dos Anjos
- Pettis
- Gaethe
- Benson
- Poirier
- Giblert
- BJ
- Chandler
- Gomi
- Aoki
Sean Sherk.
didnt make my top 15. Different time, different talent pool… I should have put BJ lower too tbh
Gomi being on there feels weird. MMA is a funny sport, you could have a good 2 years and win like 8 fights, and people will ignore the other 15 years of your career where you suck mega ass and still have you on an all time great list.
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yeah maybe remove him but then who do you replace him with?
at least you got #1 right lolol
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That’s the problem. I’m in my head trying to think of who would be better, and I have trouble. Then I’m forced to go “Man MMA is fucking dumb”
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LW is a very hard weight class to rank. Very few long reigning champions and some of the longer reigning champions have questionable wins (looking at you, Benson). I think Khabib is easily the best LW ever, and the greatest. After that it’s tough. I think a second win over Conor gives Dustin a legit claim to #2, and puts him above Tony Ferguson. I think the other contenders are RDA and BJ, with honorable mentions to Frankie and Benson.
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I think we’ve reached a point where BJ can safely be shuffled outside of the top 10. Fringe 10, 9, maybe 8 if you’re really generous.
When the modern era has seen guys go on 8 fight win streaks against murderous fighters and not even sniff a title shot, it’s pretty hard to keep heaping praise BJ’s 2 and 3 fight win streaks against grapplers who can’t throw a good punch.
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Nobody who watched him fight at LW during his prime and knows what they are talking about thinks this. His wins over Gomi, Sherk, Pulver, and Kenny Florian were excellent. BJ had legendary TDD, a punishing ground game, and great striking. He is clearly a top 10 all-time LW.
The runs at LW are all short. Benson, RDA, Pettis, Eddie, Conor, and Frankie – none of these guys had long reigns.
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Gomi is a borderline bum. I don’t know if he’s ever thrown anything besides an amateur-ish winging punch in his entire life. Sherk is a certified midget. Florian is an unathletic skinny nerd.
BJ’s best wins are dudes who would go 2-5 on untelevised prelims and get sent back to Titan FC in the modern day.
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I’ll just repeat that “Nobody who watched him fight at LW during his prime and knows what they are talking about thinks this.”
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GSP said that BJ Penn was the highest-skill opponent he ever fought. At his peak, BJ was amazing.
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BJ has to still be a top 5 if not a top 3 lightweight of all time. Putting guys above him who never sniffed a title reign is absurd.
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I don’t know man, there are plenty of middleweights who never got a title who I’d put above Dave Menne or Evan Tanner. Holding a title isn’t what matters to anyone who knows anything.
There was a clear point in time where Liddell was better than Tito, beating better competition than Tito, yet Tito held the belt. Are we going to look at the world through an ignorant lens and just write it off as “TITLE OR BUST, ONLY THING THAT MATTERS IS A TITLE”
BJ held a cute little belt and fought cute little jiu jitsu guys, and midgets with t-rex arms, and other guys who don’t hold up to the test of time. Sorry bro, time marches on, eras come and go. BJ, best of his era? Sure. All time? Oof. Buddy is lucky to even be in top 10 talks at this point.
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I think it’s extremely difficult to make all time lists. The problem comes with how do you rank past fighters when every new generation is going to be better than the last. This is the same with any sport. Realistically the top athletes of the nba, nfl, nhl, tennis, whatever would dominate the best from 20 years ago as those guys would dominate the people 20 years before them. Training techniques, nutrition, equipment, it improves constantly and has massive effects on athletic performance.
So we are left with two ways of doing this. We rank each fighter based on how they did against the competition of their time and how dominant they were. BJ was a dominant guy, he beat Gomi who was unquestionably the man at the time. Neither guy was a scrub and when I think of all time greats I those are two names that pop in my mind. It doesn’t matter that the #20 ranked guy now would decimate them. Just like it doesn’t matter that Wayne Gretzky would struggle to even keep up to the speed of modern hockey let alone have 200 points a season.
The other way, and much more difficult way, is to try to project past athletes forward and given them everything current athletes have and try to make assumptions on how they would do. Would Jordan be even better now? Would Bobby Orr had a full career given modern medicine? Could Jesse Owens challenge Usain Bolt with better nutrition, shoes, training programs. Very hard to calculate. Now MMA isn’t that old so we have a little bit of an easier time with this but stoll, the advances in the last 10 years alone have been significant. Look where mma was in 2010, now 2000, now 1990. It’s actually pretty crazy how fast it has evolved.
I’m not going to make an argument for any one person because everyone on that list is/was a fantastic fighter. However I really think you have to judge guys against how far ahead of the competition they were at the time they were relevant, not against all the new athletes that would beat them now. 20 years from now we will be talking about how Khabib would get smashed by whoever’s in the top ten then just like people shit talk Rocky Marciano despite a perfect record. Just because the Klitschko bros would have slept Ali inside a few rounds doesn’t mean they are greater than him all time. Good discussion here so far though.
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Why dismiss Sherks wins and not Khabibs?
And BJ went up in weight and beat Hughes.
BJ belongs in the top 5 for sure.
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A perfect record, as a 190 pound guy fighting against 40 year old light heavyweights. Is it his fault that the competition was the shits during his time? Nah. But that doesn’t mean we should forever hold him in high regard. He had probably the most rotten fight style ever witnessed. During his day, all the boxing writers of the time thought it was laughable to view him as being one of the best. A few decades pass, all of a sudden it’s a given that he’s an all time great? Fuck that. Rocky stinks, his fights are unwatchable, and BJ is a bitch.
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