What are the top 5-10 fighters you consider the best ever at this moment. here is mine: 1. GSP 2. Jones 3. Fedor 4. Aldo 5. Silva
No order Sakuraba Fedor Anderson Wanderlei Couture Aldo Jones then a drop off until you get to: Minotauro, GSP, Edgar, Hendo etc
Prime for Prime Fedor Igor Vovchanchyn GSP Mirko Cro cop Wanderlei Silva Liddell Couture Werdum Machida Chris Weidman Bas Rutten Cain Velasquez
Top 5 are relatively undisputed with Fedor, Silva, Jones, Aldo and GSP. From then on it depends... If you give more value to resume guys like Vitor, Werdum, Dominick Cruz and even Jake Shields can claim to be top 10 ATGs because they have a lot of great wins and more or less lost only to elite fighters. If you take a more "pound for pound" approach then guys who fought above their weight like Sakuraba, BJ Penn and Frankie Edgar deserve a place. And some active guys in their prime like Rockhold have a great resume already and are no doubt ATG-level skill-wise. Then you have guys who were great in their prime but were shot quite early in their career because of injuries like Shogun. Some guys like DC, Cro Cop and Nogueira are arguably ATGs but were unfortunate enough to have a superior ATG rulling the division.
Fedor (if he's not on a list, the list is ****) Anderson Silva GSP Jones Couture The 5th one could be between 5-6 fighters.
1. Fedor 2. Silva 3. Jones 4. GSP 5. Johnson (no matter how much I dislike that category) Hard to rank them in their own place... but I believe Fedor is definitelly #1 just 1 millimeter above Silva... I believe Jones will be greater than GSP at the end of his career. Maybe the greatest