Craig Jones was reportedly given the offer of a coaching role for the first UFC BJJ reality show, and he has now explained why he actually turned it down. The promotion was building hype for their new show for almost a year before it took place, but the reviews were mixed in the end. The inaugural season of UFC BJJ: Road to the Title saw sixteen grapplers battle it out for a chance to become the promotion’s first champions at lightweight and welterweight. There was some elite talent involved of course, but there were also some notable names missing from both divisions.
One of the biggest talking points around the season was actually the inclusion of Rerisson Gabriel, who coached opposite Mikey Musumeci during the show and then faced him for the vacant bantamweight title at the end. That match went exactly as most people would have expected, as Musumeci won by submission in the UFC BJJ 1 main event. According to Jones, Gabriel wasn’t actually the first choice:
“As far as I know, pure speculation here, speculation, was that it was going to be Gordon (Ryan) and Mikey (Musumeci), but Gordon is pursuing politics and doesn’t want to compete anymore. Also, like, those health problems could be legitimate, who knows? I don’t know. He’s also opening Kingsway, another powerhouse gym in Austin. He’s busy, and he didn’t want to compete against Mikey Musumeci. Is he scared of Mikey? No. Obviously Gordon’s probably the best ever. Mikey’s incredibly talented. There’s also a massive size discrepancy there.”
This actually mirrors exactly what Kade Ruotolo said prior to the show’s announcement. After the initial plans for UFC BJJ 1 fell through, that’s when Craig Jones became involved:
“So the second choice was, they came to call me to jump on board. They offered, I wouldn’t say the number, but they offered a decent amount of money to do it, but in terms of the commitment, obviously, it was a week of filming, and then I’d have to cut my plans to help my buddy in Ukraine. So there were a few factors going into why I wouldn’t do it.”
Although the timing didn’t work out well for Jones, he revealed that another major factor was the exclusivity involved. Jones has been rallying against exclusive contracts for quite some time, and he actually follows his own advice:
“It would also be quite a restrictive contract, and I love the power of being a free agent. Not everyone has that power where they can market themselves, they do rely on the organization to market them. I mean honestly that’s kind of why we started the B-Team (Jiu-Jitsu) YouTube channel to begin with. We wanted to be able to market ourselves without reliance on organizations.”
With both Gordon Ryan and Craig Jones out of the picture, that’s when UFC BJJ turned to Rerisson Gabriel:
“So yeah, we had had conversations, there was nothing in writing, nothing official, but for a long period of time, their athletes were able to do CJI. But when I did formally decline the offer, I asked for too much money apparently, they went with Rerisson Gabriel.”
According to Jones, that’s actually when things changed and the decision was made that the CJI 2 lineup would have to do without any UFC BJJ athletes:
“Afterwards, like they really did block their athletes from doing our event… After I formally declined the offer, when they were discussing with athletes, which they left really to the last minute, some of the athletes on the show knew for three months, some of them knew for three or four days. So any athlete that they spoke with that said they were participating in CJI, they weren’t put on the show, basically had to make a choice.”
The full interview with Craig Jones where he explains why he turned down the offer of a coaching role for UFC BJJ was uploaded to the official YouTube channel of B-Team Jiu-Jitsu:
