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The holidays are naturally a busy time for mail, but December is also a preferred period for MMA’s sorting process.

Every year, the sport’s biggest promotions always at least try to put their best foot forward during the holiday season. The month has already played host to a UFC card on Fox that factored into these rankings significantly, as well as 21 fights in some 24 hours time from the world’s biggest MMA promotion this past weekend. The immediate future has even more to offer us fight freaks.

Between Dec. 24’s Vale Tudo Japan 2012 card and the co-promotional New Year’s Eve effort from Dream and Glory, Japan will treat us to several outstanding bouts in the lighter weight classes in the coming weeks, while the UFC 155 bill in Las Vegas on Dec. 29 will crystalize the heavyweight picture with the much-awaited rematch between Junior dos Santos and Cain Velasquez. Now is the intriguing, exciting moment when we start to wonder what these rankings might look like when the calendar says 2013.

One thing that we do know, however: the bantamweight division has a king ... kind of. With UFC bantamweight champion Dominick Cruz now inactive for over a year and with no fights scheduled in the next 90 days, he is ineligible to be ranked. However, more importantly, Cruz’s allograph didn’t give him the results he hoped for following his ACL tear, forcing yet another knee surgery. The best bantamweight on the world will now spend most of 2013 the way he spent all of 2012: on the sideline.

We anxiously await the return of “The Dominator,” but profess quite an interest in seeing how the 135-pound picture resolves itself in the months to come.

Continue Reading » MMA Heavyweight Rankings