Sean Strickland is the middleweight champion. He took the belt from Khamzat Chimaev at UFC 328 in May on a split decision: 48–47, 48–47 and 47–48. On our middleweight board he is No. 3, behind Dricus Du Plessis and behind the man he just beat.
It looks wrong at first glance, so here is the long answer.
Start with the top three. Du Plessis beat Strickland twice. Chimaev beat Du Plessis. Strickland beat Chimaev. Each of them has a recent win over one of the others, so there is no order of those three names that every result agrees with. Any ranking has to decide which results to lean on.
A rating doesn't swap two fighters because one beat the other. It treats each fight as new evidence and asks how far that evidence should move what it already believed. Going into UFC 328, Chimaev was five from five at middleweight, three of them finishes, including a first-round submission of Robert Whittaker, and he had taken the title from Du Plessis. His rating was the highest in the division by some way. Strickland's was good, but it still carried the two losses to Du Plessis and the knockout against Alex Pereira in 2022.
Then the fight itself. A split decision is the narrowest way to win, and the stats didn't widen it. We scored it 73.5–26.5. Chimaev dropped 62 points and Strickland gained 44, which closed more than half of the gap between them, but not all of it.
There is a second reason the two are close on the board. The published rating is the estimate minus a margin for uncertainty, and Chimaev has six middleweight fights to Strickland's fifteen, so his margin is wider. On estimates alone Chimaev leads by 63 points. On the board it is 43.
Is that a flaw? We don't think so. The system has no idea who holds the belt. It only knows results, and on results Chimaev has done slightly more, even after losing. A champion ranked third will always read oddly next to the UFC's own list. But the alternative is a rating that trusts the latest result over everything that came before, and then one close decision outweighs years of fights. That is a lot of weight to hang on two judges' cards.
What would put Strickland above Chimaev is more evidence: another win near the top of the division, or a wider one.
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