More frequently than not, when a new fighter creeps into the rankings, I’ll take a close look at our reported professional W-L-D record for the fighter. Verifying the records sounds straightforward, right? Wrong.
Depending on the fighter’s background, you have to know where to go in order to verify the numbers. This is quite an art. Let’s take a look at an example fighter.
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Example 1: 
Olly Bradstreet
Olly Bradstreet is a fighter out of Utah, who built his career based on fights from the Ultimate Combat Experience. Never heard of them? I’m not surprised, but they have had dozens of shows in Utah, all of which are considered professionally sanctioned (I verified this with the state). MixedMartialArts and CombatRec seem like the second-tier verification, with Sherdog being the first.
Database records as of 6/2/09 11:00AM EST for Bradstreet are as follows:
FightMatrix: 36-11
Sherdog: 34-9
MixedMartialArts: 18-11
CombatRec: 29-4
MMAUniverse: 3-1
In this example, MixedMartialArts seems to have all of his losses, but only half of his wins. There are quite a few professional bouts classified as amateur as well. CombatRec and Sherdog are just missing bouts here and there, while MMAUniverse obviously doesn’t care much about the American scene.
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Example 2: 
Jesse Taitano
Jesse (or Jess, not sure) Taitano is a Flyweight from Guam. Local news sources have his record at 7-4-2, but even I cannot locate a couple of those bouts. Taitano recently burst into the World Flyweight scene with draws against Shinichi Kojima, and Yasuhiro Urushitani, while accumulating a 1-1 record between those two draws. There’s no real good sources for Pacific Rim results, so fighters from places like Guam are lacking coverage.
Database records as of 6/2/09 11:00AM EST for Taitano are as follows:
Fightmatrix: 5-4-2
Sherdog: 4-3-2
MixedMartialArts: 3-1-1
CombatRec: 1-1-1
MMAUniverse: 1-1-3
OK, now this is pretty sad… considering Taitano is Top 10 in his division. MMAUniverse actually has Taitano drawing twice against Kojima in the same night. Interesting.
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Although we’re not perfect, we like to think our database is one of the best, if not the best out there. However, the MMA scene as a whole has a lot of work to do on keeping track of professional fighters’ records.