Rankings

We mixed martial arts fans are spoiled right now. Of my Top 10 pound-for-pound fighters in MMA, seven have fought in the last two months, and the other three have fights scheduled in the next month. I don't believe there's ever been a time in the short history of MMA when we had this many opportunities to see this many great fighters in this short a period of time.

So now seems like a good time to revisit my Top 10 list, where Anderson Silva remains on top, Frankie Edgar is rising, and two heavyweights make the list as they prepare to fight each other in what may be the most significant fight in UFC history.

The full Top 10 is below.

UFC 146, which has been formally announced for May 26 in Las Vegas, will be something like the Final Four of the UFC's heavyweight division: A rare opportunity to see the four best fighters in one weight class paired off against each other in the Octagon on the same night.

Junior Dos Santos vs. Alistair Overeem in the UFC 146 main event will determine the UFC heavyweight title, and Cain Velasquez vs. Frank Mir in the co-main event is a 3 vs. 4 matchup that will likely determine the next contender for the heavyweight belt.

So the top four heavyweights in the sport will sort themselves out soon. Find out how I rank the rest of the heavyweight division below.

Other than Jon Jones, no light heavyweight in mixed martial arts has been more impressive than Dan Henderson in the last 12 months.

Henderson brutally knocked out Renato "Babalu" Sobral in December, won the Strikeforce light heavyweight title with a TKO over Rafael "Feijao" Cavalcante in March, took another TKO victory over Fedor Emelianenko in July as a light heavyweight fighting against a heavyweight, and then beat Shogun Rua in an all-time classic at UFC 139.

So where does that put Henderson? He's certainly in our light heavyweight Top 5, but it's still tough to justify Henderson going higher than fifth. Henderson did, after all, lose to Rampage Jackson, who lost to Rashad Evans, who lost to Lyoto Machida (who also lost to Rampage). The light heavyweight division has been so competitive for so long, with so many of the top fighters picking each other off, that after Jones, any of the next five guys could easily be put in any order. My order is below.

UFC President Dana White said last week that the Anderson Silva-Chael Sonnen rematch will take place in a Rio soccer stadium big enough to break the promotion's all-time attendance record, and the UFC is already hyping the fight as the biggest in history.

I wouldn't go quite that far, but I do wonder if it's the last challenge at middleweight for the greatest champion in UFC history. Silva has so dominated the middleweight division that Sonnen is just about the only opponent who has even made Silva break a sweat inside the Octagon.

So as I rank the best middleweights in MMA, I'll look at whether any of them could potentially beat Silva down the road, or whether the rematch with Sonnen is the last chance we'll have to see someone who can really threaten the best fighter the UFC has ever seen.

Carlos Condit has won the UFC interim welterweight title, and he's moved up to No. 2 on my list of the Top 10 welterweights in MMA.

Champion Georges St. Pierre remains No. 1, but Condit is as close to GSP as anyone has been in the last four years. Condit has now won 13 of his last 14 fights, and I think he'll be the best opponent GSP has ever fought when the UFC welterweight belts are unified late this year.

See how I have the rest of the welterweight Top 10 ranked below.

When Nate Diaz was interviewed in the Octagon following his tour-de-force win over Jim Miller at last weekend's UFC on FOX 3 card in New Jersey, he left no doubt who he considered the number-one lightweight in the world: Strikeforce champion Gilbert Melendez.

You'd expect him to say this, of course, since the two are training partners. But figuring out where Melendez should rank, exactly, isn't so cut and dried.

With six straight wins, the 20-2 Melendez has the second-longest current win streak of any top-10 lightweight, trailing only unbeaten Bellator champ Michael Chandler (10). During that run, "El Nino" avenged his only two career losses, to Josh Thomson and Mitsuhiro Ishida.

But can Strikeforce provide the quality of competition necessary to make a case for Melendez as No. 1?

One of the things that demonstrates Dominick Cruz's dominance over the bantamweight division in mixed martial arts is also one of the problems that the UFC is going to have promoting him going forward: He has already handily beaten most of the best 135-pound fighters in the world, and there aren't a lot of big fights for him out there.

Cruz's latest conquest was Demetrious Johnson, and that fight went a lot like most of Cruz's other fights: It wasn't a vicious, violent beatdown, but it was a one-sided display of technical dominance, a fight in which we knew within the first minute or two that we were going to see Cruz win a unanimous decision.

As much as MMA fans recognize Cruz's skill, it's going to be hard for the UFC to get the general public excited about his fights because the public likes guys who destroy their opponents better than guys who win through their technical mastery. Still, there's no doubting that Cruz is by far the best in the bantamweight division: He's already beaten most of the other Top 10 bantamweights, as you'll see below.

With Bellator getting its sixth season underway, and Pat Curran beating Joe Warren to become the promotion's featherweight champion, take a minute to consider just how much Curran's profile has risen in the mixed martial arts world since he signed with Bellator two years ago.

Curran originally entered the promotion for its Season 2 lightweight tournament, and at the time he was a little-known fighter whom people figured was just a throw-in for a tournament that was expected to anoint Roger Huerta as the No. 1 contender for champion Eddie Alvarez. Instead, Curran beat Huerta on the way to winning the tournament.

Although Curran lost his title fight against Alvarez, he then moved down to featherweight for last summer's Bellator tournament, and he was even more impressive at 145 pounds. His brutal knockouts of Marlon Sandro and Joe Warren in his last two fights have been extraordinary, and he has now firmly established himself as one of the truly elite featherweights in MMA.

So where does he rank? Find out below.

When we assemble a list of the Top 10 flyweights in MMA, there's a lot of guesswork involved, because the flyweight class really hasn't been established in MMA.

That's about to change, however, thanks to the UFC's announcement this month that it will launch the flyweight division in March. Previously, there just weren't any high-paying fights for 125-pounders, which meant that the best natural flyweights in the world were fighting bigger opponents at bantamweight.

So as I rank the Top 10 flyweights in MMA below, I'm not only ranking the Top 10 guys who have already fought at flyweight. I'm also including former bantamweights who I expect to see at flyweight in 2012. That includes the two UFC fighters who I expect to see win their flyweight debuts in March and fight for the first UFC flyweight belt in the summer.

Ronda Rousey is the best female mixed martial artist in the world.

Does that sound crazy? It might, less than a year after her first professional fight. But the reality is that in less than a year Rousey has fought five times, won them all, finished everyone in the first round and, on Saturday, defeated a high-level opponent in Miesha Tate and done it in convincing, impressive fashion.

The other reality is that the other fighters who have a case to be No. 1 woman in the world -- Cris Cyborg, Zoila Gurgel and Megumi Fujii -- all have pretty significant strikes against them. We'll get to that after we get past Rousey.

And so Rousey is at the top of our list of the best women in the world, which is below.