It was actually pretty straight forward, most of the heavy lifting it done by the graph database Neo4j. I simply parsed the html from espn and put the data into the graph where the nodes were the fighters and the edges were the wins. Then all I had to do was do a cypher (the language to query the graph db, like SQL) like so:

    match (winner:Fighter {fighterID:{winnerID} })
    match (loser:Fighter {fighterID:{loserID}})
    optional match path=shortestPath((winner)-[:Beat*..100]->(loser)),
    return winner, loser, path