Title Writing: Ranking the Fight Camps 5

Hello,

This is the fifth article in a weekly series meant to rank the top fight camps in the MMA world. Last week's rankings can be found here.

The consensus rankings for December came out last week, so there was lots of data to sort through. It seems that there is not much interest in these things thus far but I'm going to keep doing them in the hopes that they catch on. For those who read through these and wonder what good does it to rank the various fight camps, I would point you to this weekend's action and in particular Jim Hettes' destruction of Nam Phan. You see, some may not have realized Hettes is, along with Frankie Edgar, a member of the Renzo Gracie Combat Team until Joe Rogan brought it up during the fight. Thanks to Edgar, the lone member of the team appearing in his division's top 25, the camp is at the top of the Tier III rankings. (Tier III in my rankings system includes teams with only one top 25 fighter.) Clearly Renzo is starting to build a great team and you might have been swayed in Hettes' direction had you been keeping on top of the camps on my list. Perhaps I'm reaching a little bit, perhaps I'm reaching a lot but I'm just saying....

Here are the rankings, with victory data from October 3rd, 2011 through to January 3rd, 2012

A change at the top, as Black House moves into the number one spot. Jackson's suffered just a bit, as Donald Cerrone dropped his fight to Nate Diaz and one of Jon Jones' victories is no longer included in the victory data section. I had included Alistair Overeem as a member of Xtreme Couture, but it appears that his stay at the camp was short and sweet, so he appears on his own. With Xtreme Couture no longer able to count the Demolition man among their fighters, they lost quite a few points and are now on the verge of being overtaken by Nova Uniao. In fact, Uniao and Black House were the only camps in the top 5 that gained any points this week, with everyone else losing a few.

I'm still not 100% happy with the system I'm using here and I'm going to spend some time evaluating it this week. I think I might extend the victory data period to include the past 6 months and I might also include a "heating up" and "cooling down" column next week as well.

In any case, as always, thanks for reading. I'll catch up with you guys tomorrow when Numbers for Nerds looks at title runs in the UFC.