With the olympics on, I'm automatically gravitated to judo. Given that I'm a jiu-jitsu player, it's the closest thing we have to an olympic sport. You see some ground work that closely resembles what we do in BJJ, but there's significant differences. Compettition judo forces you to hunt for the submission/pin very quickly. The referees have a tendency to bring the fight back to standing if there is a momentary lapse in progression. I've always hated that, and I will never get over it. This is not to say that there's nothing wrong with competitive jiu-jitsu either. I think pulling guard without properly engaging is a complete waste of time as well, along with the minimal reward given to throws and takedowns.
This is what I hate about olympic judo...
My suggestion? Take the best of both sports and merge them together. I think grappling should always be about control, so submission will always be the preferred method of victory. But both sports have a lot to bring to the table. Below you will find a rough draft of the rules that I'd like to see in a competition environment.
Takedowns:
- Takedown to guard (double leg, single leg, etc), takedown to turtle position and spin behind: 1 pt
- Ippon throw (force, technique, and speed) to the back.
- Land in a guard: 2 points
- Land past guard and hold position: 3 points
- No guard pulling without engaging your opponent and maintaining the position.
These rules reward throwing and takedowns much better than the current BJJ rules, but don’t end the fight or penalize you the way judo currently does for leg attacks and things like that.
People will most likely lose their minds when they look at the last bullet. By no means do I think the guard is an inferior or bad position. However, I don’t like the idea of simply grabbing someone’s sleeve and dropping to my butt and starting to play open guard. If I’m on top, and someone does this to me, I should be able to disengage and force my opponent to stand back up. This kind of guard pulling should be banned. It serves no purpose.
On the other hand, if someone were to go for a throw like tomoe nage, end up on bottom and not get a successful throw but lock up a full guard, that is a perfectly fine entry into the guard. You brought your opponent to the mat, and prevented him from disengaging. I wouldn’t award points for it, but I wouldn’t penalize someone for it either. The thing I want to prevent is sitting to your butt with minimal control of your opponent.
I’ll take a second here to talk about sweeps. In the BJJ world, a sweep is a reversal that occurs from a guard. Therefore, going from side control on bottom to side control on top does not net any points for the grappler who reversed the positions. I think this is wrong. What the BJJ point system is doing is encouraging people to go back to the guard for defense. I can appreciate that, but why go back to the guard if I can power roll someone over? Also, why should I not be awarded for properly executing an upa and getting out of the mount? I’ve switched the positions and should be awarded. Therefore, sweeps, or what I would rather call reversals, should be looked at as a simple takedown and be awarded one point.
I would also love to see a mechanic that awards points for maintaining dominant control, similar to osae komi (pin). Not in the same sense that it ends a fight after a certain amount of time, but in the sense that you should be rewarded for maintaining a dominant position. This also gives the player on bottom a reason to escape. The mechanic will be similar to riding time in collegiate wrestling. Every minute, award the grappler on top one point. This forces the man on bottom to work for the escape, and also rewards the man on top for maintaining control.
In BJJ tournaments, you’re awarded advantage points for actions such as near submissions, sweeps, etc. They seem to be applied so arbitrarily from referee to referee that we see many people lose on advantage points when the match ends tied. Simple solution: get rid of them. Overtime is a perfectly fine way to settle a tie. Wrestling does it, judo does it, BJJ can do it. BJJ is a bit different in the fact that it shouldn’t be decided by a takedown, so a sudden death over time is rather inappropriate. But a standard 3 minute overtime followed by a referee’s decision is more than appropriate.
The only remaining area to address is positional advancement in BJJ tournaments. Passing the guard, mounting, and taking the back are all rewarded separately and handsomely in BJJ. Passing the guard, mounting, and taking the back in sequence leads to 11 points, a huge swing. This is to drive home the point that BJJ has a hierarchy of positions that the creators deemed as a position from which to end a fight. It’s a completely valid system, but I don’t believe it is obligatory for a sport environment. In a purely sport context, the mount is not intrinsically more dominant than side control. They may be more dominant positions from grappler to grappler however. What I mean by that is a person like Roger Gracie is much more dominant from the mount than side control, while someone like me is a lot better from side control than the mount. We shouldn’t be deciding what is more dominant via a point system. The point system should encourage ending the fight, not a hierarchy of positions. Maintaining dominance will still award you a time based score, but not a flat set of points for simply gaining a position. Therefore, there are no additional points awarded for moving from side control to mount or from the mount to the back. All are viewed as equals.
This is obviously a first draft. I haven’t poked too many holes in this but I’d love to get other peoples’ opinions. It’s hard to think of how matches would play out. The only apprehension I have is that people would stall when past the guard. I would love to see a few matches take place under these rules to get a sense of how people roll under them.