Both William Tackett and Andrew Tackett have made the choice to sign with UFC BJJ and at the same time have ruled themselves out of competing at CJI 2. The Tackett brothers both have some history with the promotion already, as they were two of the biggest names to compete in the inaugural Craig Jones Invitational in 2024. William was competing in the over 80kg division despite being undersized against everyone else in the bracket, while Andrew had an incredibly memorable run in the under 80kg division. A lot has changed since the though of course, with the biggest change in the sport being the increased involvement of the UFC.
William opened first spoke about how much of a big decision it was for him and Andrew to compete in the inaugural CJI:
“It was a big risk because by pulling out of ADCC, we didn’t really have that much time heads up. We had won the trials and a few months later ADCC is there, so we didn’t find out about CJI until I think two months before ADCC. So we pulled out like pretty short notice even though we were the first persons to pull out of the event. Andrew and I were the first people to pull out of ADCC going into CJI and we had a lot to risk because we actually kinda burned the bridge with ADCC.”
He’s not wrong either; as the first two major competitors to make that switch, that move by the Tackett brothers undoubtedly helped play a part in convincing so many more to do the same. It will likely have cost many competitors their relationship with ADCC, and he thinks he’ll be put to the back of the queue in their eyes:
“If we want to go back and compete for ADCC, we’ll probably have to win the Trials again… And I’ve won the trials twice, and I’ve medalled five times so like you’d think I’d probably get an invite back but like given the circumstances, I totally understand I’ll probably have to go win a Trials again if I ever want to compete for ADCC again. So we took a lot of risk there.”
After the dust settled on CJI and ADCC 2024, it was time for the Tackett brothers to consider their next move. According to William, they had quite a few different offers on the table and it took a long time to come to a decision:
“We received an offer and we put a lot of thought into it. We talked to all different organizations, we tried to make the best decision we could, and I didn’t even accept the contract and actually sign the contract till months afterwards. We, I think, received my first offer in November or December and I didn’t sign till like March. So like it took me a while to figure out what the best decision was.”
William Tackett then explained why he and Andrew eventually chose to go with UFC BJJ, and why it was actually pretty similar to their original choice to do CJI:
“For us looking at all these other organizations and then looking at the UFC, and the UFC talking about how they want to make the sport of Jiu-Jitsu kind of like their new thing; they want to blow up kind of like how they did with Powerslap… We’re like ‘okay, well we kind of want to hop on the bandwagon.’ We did the same thing with CJI. We were kind of team ADCC and then CJI came along with what we thought was maybe a better opportunity and we took that opportunity. Now for CJI it’s kind of the same thing, like CJI 2 is coming along but you know we have this offer from the UFC and we had maybe all these other organizations that reached out to us, and UFC seemed like the best option for us.”
Despite the fact that the UFC is famous for it’s use of exclusive contracts and William Tackett has actually explained the benefit of them before, he also revealed that both he and Andrew did originally want to compete at CJI 2 as well:
“UFC did not say anything about us not being able to participate within CJI 2, that was never discussed. We actually talked about ‘hey, would love to compete for you guys but we want to compete in CJI 2 because we really want to support the event, we appreciate what they’ve done for us, and we just really want to be a part of it, and the chance to win a million dollars is just… You can’t really put a price on that other than a million dollars, right?”
That’s when the first problem arose for William, because CJI 2 was announced as a Quintet-style team grappling event instead:
“For Andrew and I, this was a little bit of a downside because we don’t really belong to a solid team. We are affiliated with Checkmat because my coach is a Checkmat black belt but we don’t ever really train with the Checkmat guys. We don’t really like associate with them too much. We’re kind of like a small gym from Texas that’s pretty far away from Checkmat and we don’t get too much crosstraining in. So I don’t really consider us Checkmat, I consider us our own thing. I’ve always just said that I was from Team Fight Factory.”
Although he wasn’t really able to represent his own team, Tackett had the idea of putting forward a team representing Kasai with other notable names like Roberto Jimenez. Apparently that wasn’t to be:
“They kinda shut that down because they said that we would have to be like a legitimate team training together regularly, and there’s no super-teams allowed. So I totally get that, we understand that, but that was another hit for us.”
That’s when it seems like the decision to forgo CJI 2 in favor of UFC BJJ became a little bit easier for William and Andrew Tackett, and he shared some great insight into his thought process:
“For us to have the like the machine of the UFC behind us, building us, giving us consistent matches… Let’s say in our contract we have X many matches per year, well we’re guaranteed those matches per year, we’re guaranteed the pay of those matches per year, it’s just consistent for us. It’s consistent, they’re behind us, they’re trying to build us. For us we were kinda like ‘ok we don’t really have a strong team to compete for CJI, we tried to assemble something, it didn’t really work out.’ Alright we could try to assemble maybe like a Team Misfits but like for me, I’m not really going to compete in something unless I know I have a chance of winning.”
He then weighed up the pros and cons of the decision pretty succinctly:
”Andrew and I just didn’t really think it was on the cards for us when we can compete for one match, prepare for one opponent in our weight class, we’re not having to deal with Quintet where we’re fighting absolute. We can fight within our weight class within the UFC, X amount of matches per year, and X amount of dollars per match, and it’s just consistent for us.”
William Tackett explained why he and his brother Andrew aren’t doing CJI 2 in a recent video uploaded to his official YouTube channel:
