This article is part of our Craig Jones Invitational 2024 coverage. To get live results, play by play, and commentary, we’ll have a live updates article running all weekend.
The Craig Jones Invitational has struck again, as Mackenzie Dern has now left ADCC 2024 in order to compete against Ffion Davies in an amazing match at CJI. This is now the second single match that has been booked for the event, as Craig Jones himself will be facing Gabi Garcia in a crazy matchup. This announcement has been quite a long time coming now and it’s clear that there’s been a few things to work out, as Davies was actually one of the first competitors to make the decision to leave ADCC 2024 for CJI and she did so without a confirmed opponent.
While the two million-dollar tournaments at CJI were always going to tempt ADCC competitors into turning down their invites, nobody originally predicted that the event’s single matches were going to cause such chaos. This CJI bout between Mackenzie Dern and Ffion Davies in particular has done a huge amount of damage to the women’s under 55kg division at ADCC 2024. Not only are both of these women former ADCC world champions, but they were also most likely the two biggest draws in the bracket as well. Considering that ADCC has only recently added a third women’s division ready for 2024, there was even more riding on this division than normal.
It was surprising enough that Dern announced she was going to compete at ADCC 2024 in the first place, as she’s been spending the last seven years focusing exclusively on her professional MMA career. It’s been worthwhile too, as she’s managed to progress to the very top of the UFC women’s strawweight rankings in that time. It’s come as even more of a shock then that she’s now decided to reject that invite in favor of competing at CJI, although she has said before that Davies is the BJJ competitor she wants to face the most.
The Craig Jones Invitational announced the news that Mackenzie Dern was going to face Ffion Davies in a match at CJI in a recent post to their official Instagram account:
