With UFC's latest rankings edit, some troubling questions arise

As of Monday afternoon, Nate Diaz was listed as the UFC’s fifth-ranked lightweight. On Tuesday he was nowhere to be found in the top 15.

Gone. Vanished. Was there a Monday night event I didn’t know about? Maybe one where Diaz got quietly trounced by some no-name opponent who knocked him off the UFC’s official rankings altogether?

No, nothing like that. Instead Diaz, like fellow lightweight T.J. Grant, who’s been out nearly a year with symptoms apparently related to a concussion suffered in training, was “removed due to inactivity,” according to a UFC official who explained the rankings reshuffle in an email to MMAjunkie on Tuesday. The cause of that inactivity, according to the same UFC official, is “related to [Diaz’s] refusal to accept bouts.”

“There is no timetable for if and when he returns. Thus, he’s been removed from the rankings.”

This seems troubling, and I write that as someone who normally doesn’t care one bit for rankings lists or pound-for-pound shouting matches.

You can almost make sense of the decision to drop Grant. He last fought on May 25, 2013, so it hasn’t been quite a year since his last fight, but his concussion symptoms have prevented him from even seriously thinking about when or where his next fight will be. You could argue that at some point the division has to move on, and the rankings must be adjusted accordingly. It seems logical.

Then again, if that’s the case, why is former UFC bantamweight champion Dominick Cruz still listed on the rankings? His last fight was in October of 2011. He’s since vacated the title due to lingering injury woes, but still, there he is at No. 9 because, according to the UFC, he has a “tentative” date for his return.

You could make a similar point about women’s bantamweight contender Cat Zingano, who hasn’t fought in over a year and has no upcoming bout booked, yet is still ranked No. 1 on the women’s 135-pound list. Or how about former UFC middleweight champ Anderson Silva? As encouraging as those videos of him walking down stairs and kicking inanimate objects might be, he’s been out since that nasty leg break against current champ Chris Weidman in December. And still, Silva is No. 1 at middleweight and No. 7 on the pound-for-pound list.

So what gives? How did Diaz, who TKOd Gray Maynard in November, get dropped?

According to his manager, Mike Kogan, Diaz has “made his intention to sit down and discuss his contract pretty clear.”

“That hasn’t happened,” Kogan told MMAjunkie on Tuesday. “UFC wasn’t interested. So now we’re just kind of chilling. He’s taking a little time off.”

Or, as the UFC sees it, he’s inactive. The question is to what extent that’s a distinction that the UFC alone gets to make, and what that means for a rankings system that’s supposed to be compiled by voting members of the media.

I should point out here that none of us at MMAjunkie participate in the UFC’s rankings. Plenty of other media members do, however, and you can find a list of them on the UFC’s rankings page, along with their most recent ballots. Those who had Grant and Diaz on their 155-pound lists, which seems to be just about everyone, now have blank spots where those names used to be. That means the UFC edited those ballots on its own, apparently without the consent or prior knowledge of the voting members. That’s a problem. Just how big of a problem depends on what you think about the whole concept of ostensibly media-generated UFC rankings to begin with.

One person who doesn’t think much of them at the moment is Kogan. Neither he nor Diaz have ever been tremendously concerned with the number next to a fighter’s name, he insisted, but he has even less concern for them now “if it’s this easy to get on and off them.”

“It just sucks that somebody can so easily manipulate it,” Kogan said. “To me, it just shows that these rankings are made up. Whoever needs to be on there gets on there, and others get taken off.”

You could argue, and I have, that rankings – whether the UFC’s or anyone else’s – don’t mean much. They’re speculative, theoretical, often internally inconsistent. They’re not so much a discussion topic as they are fodder for arguments. Be that as it may, tune into a UFC weigh-in show sometime and you’ll see that the organization itself seems to put a lot of stock in them.

Those little numbers are all over UFC broadcasts. They’re used to justify matchmaking decisions, to hype upcoming fights, and even to negotiate contracts. Talk to UFC fighters, and you’ll quickly find that there are a whole lot of guys out there who can’t remember their mothers’ birthdays, but know exactly where they (not to mention their rivals) stand in those rankings at all times.

In that sense, at least, the rankings matter. And if you mention to UFC President Dana White that you have some beef with those rankings, he’ll tell you to take it up with the media, since they’re the ones who determine the rankings. Except, of course, for situations like this, when media members say Diaz is a top-10 lightweight and the UFC decides, nah, veto.

That’s the UFC’s right, I guess. It owns those rankings and it can do what it wants with them. It just feels, especially in this case, that what it wants is to use them a little vindictively. Diaz refuses to fight because he’s unhappy with his contract. The UFC is in turn unhappy with Diaz’s refusal, so it expels him from the rankings for “inactivity” while letting far less active fighters stay on.

That feels petty, like the rankings are being used to punish or send a message. Again, if that’s how the UFC wants to use them, that’s its prerogative. The media members who participate in them, maybe they need to ask themselves whether they’re comfortable with being used to that same end.

As for Diaz himself?

“I’m sure he’s drinking himself to death with sorrow,” said Kogan. “It’s whatever. Who cares.”

For more on the UFC’s upcoming schedule, stay tuned to the UFC Rumors section of the site.