Craig Jones has recently decided to name the promotion that he thinks produce the most exciting grappling events in a recent episode of El Segundo podcast, and the answer might be surprising. As one of the top BJJ competitors on the planet, Jones has a valuable insight into how engaging and exciting different rulesets might be. After all, he’s competed under every single ruleset there is over his career. He’s competed under both IBJJF and ADCC rules multiple times along with several different versions of EBI rules, but he doesn’t think any of them produce the most exciting events.
In fact, the promotion that Craig Jones thinks produces the most exciting grappling events is actually the original team grappling tournament:
“So Quintet is the… Like I think personally the most exciting grappling events that have ever been put together were Quintet, because they found a way to make stalling exciting. The worst part of our sport is when nothing’s happening right? But Quintet would always be a 4-team tournament, and each team would consist of 5 people under 940lbs or something. So you obviously could structure that however you want. You could get a couple of f*cking giants and a couple of midgets in there, you could have 5 even level guys.”
The conversation only came up because Quintet is returning for the first time in 2 years and of course, this is huge news in the grappling world. Jones makes a great point though, stalling is often the worst part of our sport and every promotion has gone to great lengths to try and combat it in order to improve the viewing experience. Quintet has taken a completely different approach though:
“What would make it exciting would be that stalling could be strategic, you know what I mean? Like if your team’s not as good as the other team and you’re facing someone who’s really, really good, you know maybe an elite-level guy on the other team, and you’re just like ‘sh*t if I survive then this guy’s out of the event’ because it’s last man standing.”
“So really stalling becomes exciting now, because there’s a skill discrepancy. It becomes fun to watch this really good guy try to beat a guy who’s shelling up… The teams environment makes it so stressful because it’s like, you can’t really warm up, you don’t know when you’re gonna go. Once you elect your 5-man lineup, you can’t change it until round 2 of the event. But yeah, it was crazy exciting.”
Craig Jones even competed in the original Quintet event representing team Polaris, so he has first-hand experience of how exciting the tournament is both as a competitor and a viewer. It’s clear that he wasn’t just making it up either, because he recently jumped at the chance to lead B-Team at Quintet 4 when New Wave dropped out of the lineup. It isn’t just because Quintet is exciting for competitors and existing fans either, because the main goal of any sports event should always be attracting new viewers. Appealing to the existing audience is great but growing it even bigger is always the goal, and that’s where Jones thinks Quintet really shines:
“I don’t think there’s another event out there that you could actually show people that don’t do Jiu-Jitsu. Even ADCC and stuff, it’s like ‘bro this is 48 hours’ you know? Like most of the time people aren’t going to be invested in anything. But if there’s 4 teams, the event’s a 2 hour event. That’s enough Jiu-Jitsu you know? This ain’t an MMA event, we don’t want watch f*cking 7 hours of this sh*t. So 4 teams, they pick a team, they get invested in it like the primitive f*cking NBA, NFL. You just pick a team, you’re invested in your team and you watch the drama unfold.”
The full episode of El Segundo podcast where Craig Jones names his pick for the most exciting grappling promotion was uploaded to the official YouTube channel of B-Team Jiu-Jitsu:
