Craig Jones has just shared screenshots of death threats that he’s received from one of the ADCC organizers, Seth Daniels. Daniels has been known for responding to criticism in a less-than-professional manner in the past, and he actually challenged the public to do a better job of creating a major tournament when ADCC 2022 was criticized. Now it seems as though he’s gotten what he asked for back then, as Craig Jones has decided to dedicate several months of his life to doing exactly that. He has done a fantastic job of causing major disruption in the professional grappling world and hitting ADCC where it hurts, by booking his event on the very same weekend as ADCC 2024.
Of course, going head-to-head isn’t enough to actually cause any damage to ADCC alone. What’s really causing an exodus of professional grapplers is the simple fact that the Craig Jones Invitational is going to pay the winner 100 times more than ADCC. That’s what has been attracting so many of the biggest names in the sport this year and that’s got to be causing some frustration behind closed doors. While the rivalry between ADCC and the Craig Jones Invitational has been largely centred around the business decisions of the promotions, it appears to be crossing over into personal territory now.
In fairness to ADCC, not everyone has been reacting to the Craig Jones Invitational like Seth Daniels and sending the host death threats. Despite the fact that Jones has undoubtedly been making his life more difficult recently, ADCC head organizer Mo Jassim has actually been very respectful in public. That’s how it should be too, because at the end of the day this is still a professional sport and it doesn’t benefit from key figures doing things like this. In many major sports, social media activity like this by important people would simply not be tolerated.
Craig Jones shared screenshots of the death threats he received from Seth Daniels in a recent post to his official Instagram account:
