Craig Jones has just announced his own personal retirement from Jiu-Jitsu competition, and that will also signal the end of B-Team Jiu-Jitsu too. It’s been a long and winding road to get to this point and it’s no exaggeration to say that both Jones and the team have had a massive impact on the sport. Jones started out by making some jokes about winning silver medals at ADCC and EBI, but what started as a throwaway joke became one of the biggest brands in the sport. It all began in the wake of the Danaher Death Squad breakup, when several key members splintered off and returned to the US together.
Jones and his teammates immediately set about building a location and the silver medal-joke took on a new life, as B-Team Jiu-Jitsu was born. The next few years saw them explode in popularity both as individual competitors and as a team in general, sharing a massive amount of content with the public and gaining their attention in return. From interviews to rolling footage and travel videos to technical advice, the elite competitors at B-Team Jiu-Jitsu shared everything about the Jiu-Jitsu lifestyle. It was a level of insight that no other academies were sharing at the time but in just a few years, it’s become fairly common.
With success both on and off the mats, things took their most surprising turn just last year when Jones secured 3 million dollars of funding for his first ever tournament. It was immediately going to be the highest-paying event in the history of the sport and a job like that requires a ton of work as a promoter. Jones pulled off the unthinkable and the inaugural Craig Jones Invitational pushed the sport even further into the mainstream consciousness. The job wasn’t done though, and it was only a few months later that Jones announced CJI 2 and the new team grappling format it would operate under.
The Craig Jones Invitational was clearly here for the foreseeable future but Jones was also being pulled in other directions with his seemingly endless charity-work and support for Ukraine. Craig Jones was now wearing about ten different hats, constantly travelling, and fans started to speculate that a retirement was incoming given that he was already in his 30s. Even though his other roles meant that he was hardly in Austin, Texas any more, he was still a key part of the B-Team brand. It’s no surprise then that stepping away from the sport has meant that the team will undergo a complete rebrand.
The majority of the team will be sticking together under the guidance of Nicky Ryan as head coach, while other founding members Nicky Rodriguez and Ethan Crelinsten are also still involved with the team. Damien Anderson is also going to remain with the team and their younger colored belt talent will presumably continue training under their existing coaches too. As for Jones, he has just one match left before he retires. He will be facing elite wrestler Gable Steveson in the CJI 2 superfight and his training camp for that match will just be a long run of open mats all along the long drive to Las Vegas, Nevada .
Craig Jones announced his retirement and the end of B-Team Jiu-Jitsu in a recent video uploaded to the team’s official YouTube channel:
