Data & Method

What every figure on this site is built from, what it doesn’t cover, how often it changes, and how to pull it into something else.

Coverage

Every completed UFC event from 11 March 1994 to 10 October 2026, sourced from ufcstats.com. Rankings, announced cards and fighter imagery come from ufc.com separately.

Method and round are recorded for essentially every fight back to UFC 1. Round-by-round striking, grappling and control statistics are the part that isn’t universal: 21 fights (0.2%) have no round-level record, mostly early-era cards where the sport itself didn’t keep them. Any figure built from round-level data (strikes landed, takedowns, control time) is computed only over fights that have it — never padded or estimated.

The 2015-onward rule. Insights stories restrict round-level analysis to fights from 2015 on, even though the data reaches further back. Statistic-collection practices changed enough before then that mixing eras risks measuring a change in recording, not a change in the sport. Method and outcome (who won, how, which round) use the full history, since those are unambiguous either way.

Statistical method

• Every rate gets an interval. Proportions are reported with a 95% confidence interval (p ± 1.96√(p(1−p)/n)). A subset too small to clear its own interval is reported as inconclusive, not as a smaller effect.
• Comparisons use the interval on the difference, not two separate intervals eyeballed side by side — two groups can each individually look real while the gap between them is not distinguishable from zero.
• Paired designs where they apply. Some questions (does a fighter start slower in a five-round fight?) are answered by comparing each fighter against their own record in the other condition, not against the field, to avoid confounding the question with who tends to get booked into which kind of fight.

How it's kept current

An automated pipeline runs after every event: results are ingested, rankings refresh, predictions score against the actual outcome, and the story index and sitemap rebuild. Story pages are frozen snapshots by design — each one states the database state it was computed against in its own footer — but the site’s entity pages (fighters, events, fights) reflect the current database on every request.

Reuse

Every published story is available as a clean, structured document in addition to its page, meant for exactly this:

See /llms.txt for an indexed list of every story with a one-line summary of what it found.

License

The analysis, the prose and every derived figure on this site are licensed CC BY 4.0 — reuse them, with attribution to Fight Stats. The underlying fight records are sourced from ufcstats.com and are not this site’s to relicense; attribute those to ufcstats.com specifically if you use them directly. Rankings, announced cards and fighter photography come from ufc.com and carry ufc.com’s own terms.

Support

Fight Stats is independent and free, and stays that way. If you’d like to chip in, Happtip splits one monthly contribution across the independent apps you actually use. Connecting is optional and changes nothing about the site — every figure, story and prediction here is the same whether you do or not.

← Back to Insights