Craig Jones and Mikey Musumeci have just agreed to debate one another on a wide range of controversial topics in the BJJ world right now, and it will be streamed live on a special episode of Demetrious Johnson’s podcast on August 26th, 2025. There’s no real bad blood between the two men so it’s unlikely that the debate gets particularly heated, but they do disagree on quite a few topics. They also currently stand on opposite sides of one of the biggest rivalries in the sport right now, as Jones is the founder of the Craig Jones Invitational and Musumeci is one of the inaugural UFC BJJ world champions.
That’s actually the source of some of their disagreements too, particularly the UFC’s practice of using exclusive contracts to keep their athletes from competing elsewhere. Musumeci was the first competitor to publicly sign an exclusive contract with UFC BJJ and he’s been vocally supportive of it, whereas Jones has come out against the use of exclusive contracts. Although he’s raised some excellent points about the drawbacks of signing those types of deals both on an individual level and as a sport, Jones is not without bias and as a promoter he obviously benefits from elite athletes being free agents too.
Although that’s one of the most important topics they’ll be debating, there’s several other topics on the agenda. Most notably finance coach Derek Moneyberg’s promotion to black belt in just 3.5 years. It was Jake Shields who actually gave him his black belt, but Musumeci has trained with Moneyberg in the past and actually publicly vouched for his skill level when he was faced with criticism. That will undoubtedly be an interesting topic to hear them discuss, while the rest will be a little more light-hearted. Subject matter like the design choices of the UFC BJJ belt won’t have as much impact on the sport, but they’ll still be entertaining.
Craig Jones announced the news that he was going to debate Mikey Musumeci on an episode of Demetrious Johnson’s podcast in a recent post to his official Instagram account:
