Sherdog’s Top 10: Greatest Pound-for-Pound Men

10b. Stipe Miocic

This inclusion caught me by complete surprise. Sure, Miocic had finished 2nd on our heavyweight list—I had him 4th—but on a pound-for-pound list, he wouldn't have cracked my own Top 50, let alone Top 10. The reason is that the heavyweights are massively less skilled than the other weight classes, and it's utterly jarring how wide that gap is. In fact, I wrote an article not long ago about how much better an elite bantamweight contender like Cory Sandhagen is than Miocic. There's only a single fighter who fought solely at heavyweight that I think should make this list and it's certainly not Miocic, no matter how often he proclaims himself the greatest heavyweight ever. Let's give a great champion his due, however. Thanks to Miocic's indomitable will, toughness and constant desire to train and improve, he had two things almost no other top heavyweight did: consistency and longevity. Cain Velasquez and Junior dos Santos may have been better than Miocic at their absolute best, but they had very short primes and were well past it by their early 30s. Miocic was a champion well into his mid and even late 30s. That's rarer than we realize, as many heavyweights stay contenders into that age, but few are the best. Furthermore, even I have to bow my head in respect to Miocic's victory in his first encounter against Francis Ngannou, one of the greatest, most impressive triumphs in the division's history. Miocic was great, just not nearly great enough to be on this list, in my view.

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