Next Years CJI

So after watching CJI I think we can all agree we want to see the next one. I also watched ADCC and just couldn’t care. The ruleset isn’t very good for encouraging jiu jitsu. People game the ruleset and stalled a lot more. I think it was both a combination of lack of financial motivation to push for a sub, and a ruleset which allows the competitors to get up on points and then stall for the rest of the match. Craig showed how important it is for a seasoned competitor to weigh in on rules - it seems like his decisions were almost serendipitous, they worked to provoke action so well. These are my thoughts on what could be improved for the next one:

1) more divisions. Add women’s divisions, more weight classes. Run it as a 3-day event (Friday to Sunday) with no matches happening at the same time. I’d rather watch CJI for 3 days than ADCC and I am 100% sold on this. It helps me to be invested in each division since I know which athletes have won which match. I love jiu jitsu, but when I have 3 matches I want to watch happening at the same time it almost makes me uninvested in all of them since I’m missing two matches I wanted to see. Not to mention, the level of action in CJI vs ADCC was incomparable. 2) this is less of an actual suggestion and more of a gripe with what happened. I would’ve liked to see the athletes build each other up more and not use the platform to put down aspects of the sport since the goal is to grow it. I felt that Levi won the finals, you can disagree, but either way I felt that Ruotolo put on a banger of a match with Tackett and then used his newly acquired favour with the crowd to immediately bias them against Levi with his post fight speech. It actually bummed me out because Levi is the perfect example of a technical, active, aggressive guard player. He was destroying peoples legs all weekend. To shit on a guard like that means you’re going to essentially dissuade any new fans of the sport from enjoying a great guard player like Levi. I know ruotolo understands the importance of the guard game in jiu jitsu so I thought it was shitty. 3) I thought the judges did an overall awesome job, but they were influenced by the crowd overly much when it came time for finals/semifinal matchups that were fairly close such as Tackett and Levi’s matches with Ruotolo. When there’s a million dollars on the line, the crowds opinion can’t come into play when making a decision like that. I’m not sure how you prevent that, but it’s definitely a concern.