Top 10 fighters of the decade

Selecting the 10 best fighters to emerge from thousands around the world who fought during the past decade is no easy process. If it was baseball, you could easily look at statistics to determine who led in home runs or WAR. If it was basketball, we might look at scoring averages, and if it was football, we’d start at Tom Brady and go from there.

In MMA, the sample sizes are small, even if a decade seems like an eternity while it’s happening. For example, the most active fighter to make the list competed 26 times. In baseball that’s barely a month of games.

Still, this collective group proved the building blocks of the last 10 years, finishing with a combined record of 168-15-1 with three…