USA TODAY Sports/MMA Junkie rankings, July 1: A new P4P No. 1 –\u00a0and a major chart ousting
The rankings fallout from UFC 317 at International Fight Week was major – but not all of it involved fighters on the card.
Former featherweight champion Ilia Topuria became the first fighter in UFC history to win a title in a second division while unbeaten when he put ex-lightweight champ Charles Oliveira to sleep with a first-round knockout – just as he predicted he would do. The performance in the main event made him the new lightweight champion and left very little doubt he's the top pound-for-pound fighter in the world.
We also saw a giant move at flyweight after Joshua Van's Fight of the Night win over Brandon Royval. He became the next presumed title challenger for Alexandre Pantoja and show all the way up to No. 3 at 125 pounds.
But perhaps the biggest talker is a fighter who we're breaking our rules for. A fighter typically has to be inactive for two years before we'll fully boot them from our rankings. That's a policy we've had from the beginning – slow to climb into the rankings and slow to drop out. Our rankings mean something. And as such, even though he hasn't been inactive for two years, Jon Jones' decision to quit, as well as another set of legally troubling allegations, means a spot opened up at heavyweight, and one on the pound-for-pound list, for some new names.
Check out the latest USA TODAY Sports/MMA Junkie rankings.
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