Craig Jones has gone from being exclusively a Jiu-Jitsu specialist to regularly working as a cornerman for one of the best MMA fighters in the world, Alexander Volkanovski. Despite taking that career-path himself, Jones recently shared some surprising thoughts on Jiu-Jitsu specialists who become grappling coaches for MMA. He made the comments during a short review of Volkanovski’s most recent performance, where he regained the UFC featherweight title by beating Diego Lopes at UFC 314. It was a clean unanimous decision win and although the fight was almost entirely won through striking, Jones still spent a long time helping him sharpen his grappling during the lead-up.
Jones has been an important part of Volkanovski’s coaching team for a few years now, but he didn’t hold back when talking about Jiu-Jitsu specialists acting as MMA coaches in general:
“Often times a coach, especially a grappling coach for MMA, most of the time Jiu-Jitsu guys are f***ing useless.”
Jones also went on to talk about the idea of making Jiu-Jitsu work in MMA and he made some pretty astute points:
“I do personally beleive that high-level grappling at the extreme level works in MMA and Jiu-Jitsu. Even leglock entries work in MMA, it’s just to reach a level to make it effective under the threat of strikes… It’s diminishing returns because it’s gonna take you an awfully long time to develop the skills to be effective there and if you’re trying to be efficient in your training, it’s probably not worth the reward.”
It’s something that MMA fans will already be familiar with if they’ve seen the careers of leglock specialists like Ryan Hall. Although it can work, it’s clearly not the easiest path to success in MMA. Jones went on to reaffirm the idea that Jiu-Jitsu specialists aren’t going to be the most useful addition to the corner:
“Ordinarily I wouldn’t advise any MMA fighter to have a pure Jiu-Jitsu guy in their corner. Obviously most of the time I’m just holding a bucket.”
Despite being humble about his own contributions to Volkanovski, he’s clearly had a positive effect on the featherweight world champion. Craig Jones might not encourage MMA fighters to have a Jiu-Jitsu specialist as a cornerman, but he was open about the impact that they can have. He shared some insight into how he studied Lopes’ grappling skills, most notably his use of a high guard, and planned out a way to counteract his strengths in a similar fashion to how Georges St-Pierre beat BJ Penn. He then replicated Lopes’s style throughout the training camp with Volkanovski and ultimately made him more confident and better-prepared to beat Lopes on the ground if the fight went there.
The full video where Craig Jones reviews Alexander Volkanovski’s performance at UFC 314, including his comments on a Jiu-Jitsu specialist being an MMA cornerman, was recently uploaded to the official YouTube channel of B-Team Jiu-Jitsu:
