Photo by Josh Hedges/Zuffa LLC

In another move to stop their fighters from taking performance-enhancing drugs, the UFC has announced a brand new tactic.

This week, Anthony Pettis got dropped from the Ultimate Fighting Championship’s pound-for-pound rankings, filling the 11th position, while a disgraced Anderson Silva reclaimed his stake in the top ten—in 10th place—despite currently awaiting trial for testing positive for performance-enhancing drugs around the time of UFC 183, when he defeated Nick Diaz in a unanimous decision.

That all will change soon, however, as Fight Metric—the UFC’s official statistics provider—has let everyone in the voting panel know that in the future, any fighter who has been given suspensions nine months or longer will no longer be eligible to be counted in the promotion’s official rankings.

The move comes in the ebbing wake of several failed drug tests that have rocked the UFC’s foundations. Anderson Silva’s failed drug test prompted the UFC to revamp its testing protocols, even pushing them as far as hiring Jeff Novitzky, the man responsible for unraveling the infamous BALCO case that saw Barry Bonds flagged for unfair advantage-seeking.

Often enough, the idea of rankings is looked down on as an unnecessary and arbitrary system of selection. Many fighters shrug it off like it doesn’t matter to them at all. But in light of the still-fresh deal that the UFC inked with Reebok, rankings have been given brand new importance and meaning. In the promotion’s new sponsorship system with Reebok, the higher up in the rankings a fighter stands, the more money that fighter is able to take from this new Reebok deal.

So if you get popped for the juice and are in turn ineligible to be in the UFC’s official rankings, you’re pretty much fucked out of all the money you could be earning. No money from fighting because you’re suspended for at least nine months, and no money from the Reebok deal because you can’t even be ranked.

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