Ranking Fedor Emelianenko Among the All-Time Greats

by Kid Nate on Feb 17, 2011 10:07 AM EST in Strikeforce Analysis

Fedor secured his legacy by beating Antonio Rodrigo "Minotauro" Nogueira twice in Pride Fighting Championships.


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Now that Fedor Emelianenko has lost two straight fights and is no longer even arguably the best heavyweight fighting today, the discussion has begun regarding where to rank him among the all-time greats. Some critics claim that Fedor didn't fight anyone of note after beating Mirko "Cro Cop" Filipovic in 2005. Others assert that Fedor is the unmatched, unquestioned greatest ever in MMA.
Jordan Breen discusses this dichotomy (transcribed via Fight Opinion):

I think Fedor's one of the most interesting guys, possibly the most interesting guy to talk about from a historical perspective in MMA because he polarizes people in a way that NOBODY else does.
...
"What I would say for Fedor is people, some people, will always feel that, ‘oh, he's the greatest Heavyweight ever and in his prime no one cold ever beat him,' but I think most people will have a fairly regulated view that ‘this guy's the best Heavyweight we've seen but maybe his résumé isn't beyond reproach.' And this is something that I'll talk about in a minute, you know, vis-à-vis another e-mail in a moment, but something that was brought up ... broaching the idea that, hey, let's say Cain (Velasquez) reigned for three years as UFC champion.
"What it means to be UFC champion, the cycle of challengers put in front of you, you don't get time for a Matt Lindland or a Mark Hunt or Zuluzinho, so would it stand to reason if someone like Cain or Junior dos Santos won the title, if they reigned three or four years, wouldn't their résumé that they pile up would be better than Fedor Emelianenko's? And possibly, that's something that we'd have to cross the bridge when we come to it.
"But there's no getting away from the fact that, yeah, Nogueira may not great now, but those two wins at the time were against the best Heavyweight in the world and then the second best Heavyweight in the world. When (Fedor) fought Mirko Cro Cop, Mirko Cro Cop was considered, at worst, the third best Heavyweight in the world by most people and it was the most anticipated fight MMA had ever seen to that point in time. Arlovski & Sylvia, yeah they're not great but they're both considered Top 10 guys when he beat them. Fedor still beat a very, very hearty cross-section of most relevant Heavyweights of his era and has done it more successfully than other Heavyweights.
Personally I rank Fedor amongst the top five or so fighters in MMA history. His undefeated decade remains unmatched. And while he did face a less than sterling cast of opponents during the late-Pride era and before joining Affliction, his crushing victories over Tim Sylvia and Andrei Arlovski -- at a point when both men were indisputably top 10, if not top 5, heavyweights proved that Fedor was head and shoulders above the best UFC fighters of the 2000-2008 era.
I have less than no respect for those who insist on denigrating great fighters ex post facto. It's one thing for a very new fan to look at the recent fights of Fedor, Big Nog and Cro Cop and conclude that those guys aren't that good in 2011. But it's another thing entirely to conclude that they weren't all that back in the day. The problem with that argument is that it can be applied to every fighter. Due to the merciless nature of Father Time, all athletes will peak and fall. It's utterly disrespectful to the sport and its athletes to apply a "what have you done for me lately" lens to our view of history. We can only gauge the caliber of a fighter's wins based on how those opponents were viewed at the time.