A few weeks back, Islam Makhachev made the headlines with his claim that “a lot of black belts have to be cancelled”. And, for one, Craig Jones agrees with him.

In one of the recent B-Team Jiu Jitsu videos, Jones spoke how Makhachev’s grappling is superior to what many BJJ athletes know how to do:

I think Makhachev’s grappling is superior to what a lot of the traditional Jiu-Jitsu guys did because they don’t know how to hold someone down. They have no idea how to do it.

So we really got to reverse engineer what Makhachev’s doing, which I’ve been trying to do on talk, and I’m trying to teach these guys how to do it so I can practice doing it.

As he’s Alexander Volkanovski’s main coach, Craig is coaching him in this direction for his upcoming fight against Makhachev, at UFC 284:

A lot of safe ways to get up, heists, switches. Obviously I’m working on it in open space. Volkanovski is already really good against the fence to get up, but obviously tough it’s very hard work to start in that deep of him.

Jones emphasized that he agrees with Makhachev when he says that a lot of BJJ black belts have to be “cancelled”:

I honestly agree with what Makhachev says, a lot of people deserve to have that black belt taken away.

I kind of agree with that. I think what those guys are doing is sort of superior to what we’ve been doing for a long time because we built an entire sport around conceding bottom position.

I’m not one of those guys that says we should grapple as if people are striking us, but I believe we should grapple as if the tough guy knows how to pass and pins.
And a lot of guys don’t mind being on bottom because they’ve never rolled with a guy that knows how to pass guard or pin someone, so don’t know how fatiguing horrible it is.

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