I didn't intend to come across as condescending. I meant to point out the plot hole I feel you had overlooked, not suggest you couldn't understand it or couldn't have figured it out on your own or anything.

We will just have to agree to disagree. I can understand slightly more now where you are coming from now that I know you've based a lot of it on their rankings at the time, but again, we as fight fans know that mma math usually doesn't work, even if it sounds attractive. But more importantly it eliminates all context of them as fighters and the context of the fights themselves. A fighter's talent and ability isn't tied to his current ranking in almost any way, and he is still the same fighter at almost the exact same ability, although with another fight's worth of experience. Rankings are neither official, nor agreed upon, and everyone's list is different. And they are constantly irrelevant when discussing a fight. Garbrandt was ranked 7 when he beat Cruz, and he would have won that fight had he been ranked 1, 5, or 15 on that night.

I've always looked at rankings this way: every single time a lower ranked fighter beats a higher ranked fighter, or an unranked beats a ranked, anytime an underdog wins at all, it shows the rankings were wrong. And that happens every event. And then sometimes the far less skilled fighter wins for any number of reasons, including style matchups, injury, emotions, distractions, or a flat out lucky break. That proves rankings wrong as well. I think the only way rankings could be as legitimate as possible was if you could only fight the fighter one spot above and below you. Then you literally have to prove one by one that you're better than them, instead of potentially skipping from 6 to 2 or 9 to 5, or 4 to champ because you beat one guy, even though you may potentially be a worse fighter or matchup poorly against every other guy you jumped ahead of. But that system would be terrible for the sport because your next fight is always set, and it would take whole careers to earn title shots if you're a newcomer.

All that is to say, Jacare is still Jacare regardless of whether he is 3 or 2. And Weidman is still Weidman. And speaking of, Weidman wasn't 4 when he fought Romero. He was 2 in the UFCs rankings, 1 in many others because Rockhold had lost(although that shows how silly rankings can be since Rockhold handily beat Weidman). His only loss was for the title, so any website you saw that had him all the way down to 4, I would question their product knowledge. So even based solely on rankings and no context, I am definitely taking 2, 2, and 4 over 3 and 1, especially in the fight game, where 3 straight top 5 wins are quite rare.

It still feels your position is based on a Shroedinger's Whittaker situation, where Whittaker is both good enough to win and bad enough to be overrated if he loses, and is neither until it happens. I expect you'll still feel the same way you did before, although Weidman's ranking may change your mind.