Ever since the Danaher Death Squad split, one of the biggest questions about it has been – what happened between the Ryan brothers?

Gordon Ryan continued training under John Danaher in New Wave Jiu-Jitsu, whereas Nicky Ryan went with Craig Jones and Nick Rodriguez and co-founded the B-Team.
So, what happened between the two?

In a recent Lex Fridman podcast episode, Nicky Ryan spoke how he looked up to Gordon:

Both me and my brother never wanted to work a full-time job, doing something that we hate. And he was, you know, always a very confident person. So he went for it, fully started pursuing Jiu-Jitsu.

So, I’m very happy that he did that and that I ended up following his footsteps.

Because, you can ask these guys [Craig Jones and Nicky Rodriguez], I’m a lazy sack of sh*t outside of the mat… So, that’s definitely the one thing I’m very grateful for.

Gordon was a big reason why their parents let Nicky drop out of school and pursue grappling full time:

Because, you know, when they were coming up there was no money in the sport, it was very hard to make a full living.

Like, if you wanted to make a living, you’d eventually have to transfer to MMA.

However, after the Danaher Death Squad split happened, there was a great deal of animosity between the two brothers.

They didn’t even speak for almost two years… But it seems like their relationship is getting better now:

Definitely initially, during the initial split, we definitely hated each other at the beginning. But it’s definitely started to calm down.

Actually, just prior to all this social media drama that’s going on currently, he had reached out to me. And it was literally the first time that we actually talked since the split happened.
So, we didn’t talk to each other for, what is it now, almost two years?

And that was the first time we interacted again. He wasn’t aggressive towards me, I wasn’t aggressive towards him, we were cracking some jokes, so… Hopefully, the animosity is going down.

Play from seated and supine open guards like butterfly, reverse de la riva, shin to shin, and more as Nicky shows you a complete system for using wrestle up sweeps to your advantage.

• Create strong attacks using double kouchi, arm drags, front headlocks, and more of Nicky’s signature competition offense.
• Nicky is an elite black belt competitor & B-Team founder who is one of the most technical grapplers on Earth, regardless of size.