BTG 154 - CJI 2 Didn't Deliver

[Music] Hello and welcome to another episode of Breaking the Guard. On today's episode, I'm going to talk about CGI 2, which I just finished watching live. Well, at least I watched it on TV. I didn't go in person. and I'll give you the reasons why and as breakdown of the event, my impressions and what I think about uh the future of that event is. So, going into the event, I talked about this I think on Friday. I didn't hear a lot of buzz locally here in Vegas, which is weird because the fight is here and I train all over the place here and no one was talking to me about going to the event. The first time I heard someone ask me was on Tuesday when I was training with Jake uh and he was asking if I was going. I already had planned not to go because my experience last time, if you guys remember, I didn't enjoy the in-person experience at CGI. It's very slow paced, lots of waiting. Uh you're there five, six hours, and it's just too much time, idle time for for my taste. And it would be okay if I could see the matches, but even when I was front row, I was blind half the time because they were on the wall and I couldn't see anything. I was looking up at the screen and uh I just didn't feel like doing that. And I'm glad personally that I stayed at home to watch this. I could see everything clearly here. I was a lot more comfortable. I can eat, you know, and I could multitask as well. Uh so that said, day one to me was a nightmare uh for the the promotion in my opinion and I'm not alone in that. I see online a lot of people were expressing a lot of frustration and disappointment about day one. Uh so obviously there's going to be a lot of spoilers here. 22 matches. There was four submissions if I recall correctly or maybe five. I think five. Five. And two of them weren't even real submissions. They were contested. They were ref stoppages. And I would argue they weren't even taps. So, pretty bad submission ratio for an event that's supposed to be submission heavy. Now, besides the fact that there was very little submissions, there was a lot of nothing going on either. Like I obviously there's high level technique that these are some of the top grapplers in the world going against each other, but it wasn't something that I thought was enjoyable to watch or like I learned anything practical on day one. seemed like a lot of people just butting heads and not really getting any traction or people just allowing positions to happen because they just wanted to stall the guy out and double eliminate. So, uh, no one ran the table on day one. Like there wasn't a guy who like won three matches or whatever. It was all like oneoffs. I said there was only five submissions and the guys who did get submissions got eliminated right after they they got the submissions. So, we didn't see that and there wasn't really many mismatches and it's not clear to me because I did a preview of the rules which was listed and they didn't use those. So, uh, I think it was fortunately they probably didn't cuz I think I was talking about 3 five minute rounds and they actually just did one 8-minute round and, uh, the other thing that was different was I believe in quintet normally you picked beforehand your order. So, you were kind of locked in and it might not have been advantageous the order you picked, but you were locked in early. Whereas in this case, it seems like from what I've seen, they were allowed to pick on the spot, which is going to allow for more fair matchmaking because I if I see they're pulling out their heavyweight, I'm not going to throw my lightweight at them, you know, normally I'll probably throw another heavyweight at them. And day one, that's kind of what we saw there. I think there was like one or two of the mismatches in sides, but the rest of them were pretty even. And I think that also resulted in a lot of double eliminations because you have two of the best guys in the world grappling each other in eight minutes. Chances are there's not going to be a finish. So day one totally bombed in my view and took a really long time. Again, the 22 matches uh I only watched the first 20. I forgot the women's bracket finished, but it was already like 11:30 at night and I was like I was fatigued, you know. nothing was really happening. It turns out the women's matches were actually good. Uh Sarah Gaba had a great performance and uh as well as um Helena against Adele. I thought Adele was going to come out, but Helena was able to win by decision as was Sarah. And on the team side, New Wave just barely squeaked by team America, which was surprising to me that it was that close. And well, there was controversy there because Bodoni, who I think was probably the best grappler of the tournament technically and just like strategically he was sound, didn't really make uh that many mistakes. He did have problems with Taylor Pierman who seemed to get into a lot of leg locks with him. And while it didn't seem like Taylor had him in any serious catches, he was getting stuck repeatedly. And I think Taylor gave him the hardest match of the the weekend. But that being said, Taylor did get one outside Ashi heel hook, started cranking it, and Bodoni kind of reaches for his leg like this. And Taylor right away lets go and the ref calls it like, "Oh, that's a tap." Which to me is bananas. This is a a professional grappling event for high stakes million dollars and a guy reaching is going to be called a tap because the opponent misunderstood is is crazy because it didn't seem like the tightest heel hook in the world and Bodoni was still moving afterwards like he reached and then he was turning and then you know it did not look like a tap and they called that a tap which actually stopped Bodon's streak because he had just submitted the previous person and I think that helped out that team America significantly because they took out a huge player from New Wave. Uh but nevertheless, New Wave still ended up winning. Then on the other side, we had team ATOS. They were going up. Man, what was the team they went up against? Oh, they went up against Man, I can't even remember. And that's pretty sad. And I think that's just goes to the state of the the match is not being Oh, they went to team Europe. I think it was a European team. I think it was a European team. Yeah. And uh there was a lot of snoozers on that one as well. Um there were there was a submission as well I believe and I remember who was it. No no there wasn't a submission in that one. That was all double elimination. There was then uh team uh B team and they went against 10th planet if I remember correctly. And uh they that was like the only team matchup of day one that actually they eliminated all the other team because every other matchup it was had to go to the scorecards because both teams were double eliminated at the same time. Uh, and I believe Ethan Krelline didn't even compete that day because he was the one that was on reserve. Uh, there was also a controversial tap there because he got caught. Oh, wait. No, I got the teams wrong. I'm sorry. Uh, that was the Australasia team that went against 10th Planet. Yeah, because uh the Australasia team ended up winning, but a teier ended up catching someone with a heel hook, a Gio Martinez or not a heel hook, it was a straight ankle went belly down and this another like Brazilian tap type situation or like phantom tap where Gio from his force kind of like reaches back twice. It looked really weird and that one was more understanding of it looking like a tap. Although Gio contested it on the camera, it doesn't look great. But when they showed a different angle later, it didn't look like he even made contact with uh his opponent. So, I don't think he was tapping personally. I'm not sure how to explain it, but I've seen Gio let his legs break and I think he already eaten pretty bad straight ankle lock at that point from this guy. Uh, but they called that one a wrap. But then that guy ended up getting heel hooked by Kyle Bomb pretty bad uh and was injured. Now, the Australasia team ended up winning on the scorecards, but they were potentially down the injured guy, and in their rule set, you're now allowed to sub in. So, they were going to be four to five. And finally then it was B team and now I can't remember the team they went up against and uh it might come to me later but they won that one again without having to use their fifth man. So that ends up rolling into day two. Day two, Craig announced that he was going to give $50,000 submission bonus to anybody in the tournament that in the team tournament that scores a submission. That seemed to help a bit because the next matches, two team matches, there were five submissions out of 10 possible matches. That's a lot better. 50% submission ratio versus whatever it was before, which was very low. It was three or five out of 20 25%. So, he doubled the submission ratio. Uh, and the matches looked a lot more spirited. They also seem to actually make more mismatches. I don't know if it was intentional or not. And people who really shine there. One, Dorian Olivar's his guard passing, his pressure is amazing. And he was riding out people like Filipe Penna, you know, and like just big dogging him, which was crazy because, you know, Penna is a lot bigger than Dorian. But, uh, Dorian didn't seem to care. Uh, and who else had a good performance there? Uh, Panda did well. Like he actually armbarred uh Luke Griffith after Luke submitted somebody. Then he submitted Luke who looked like he gassed hard against Penna and never seemed to recover. Like he just lost his gas tank really early, broke and then was just playing submissive the whole time. And uh he needs to work on his mental toughness a bit because he was showing that sign of breaking very quickly and you should be pokerfaced and never let someone know you're you're tired. But he looked like he was beaten pretty early in that match with Penna which you would think would be a high stakes match. You lost to this guy before. You should be wanting to get that W back and he looked like he was just trying to survive and ultimately didn't. Uh it wasn't a great look for him, but he did his job as far as scoring the sub against Timatos. Uh the Bodoni also got a sub and then Felipe got a sub. So those were the three submissions, but Dorian was the one that eliminated Penna, uh which obviously took a big player off the plate there. New Wave ends up winning the Ats matchup. Again, that was much that was more what I think people were hoping to see. There was size mismatches or whatnot. So, that looked good. On the other side, we had B team with the Australasia team, although they were handicapped because they were coming in with four men, but their guys did what they were supposed to do. Although Nikki Rod got eliminated by Kenta Iwamoto just by Kenta being tough and not allowing any subs to come in place. Even had a moment where he was he scored a takedown himself and got on top. Nicki Rod didn't look particularly uh great in this tournament either. Like he did what he had to do, but the last CJI he looked fantastic. this one. He was very vulnerable. He got taken out a bunch of times uh by Pixley and Footswept. Uh struggling to take down other people in this tournament that we'll talk about. So, not a good showing for him. Bodoni to me looked great. Um Dorian looked great. Another one that actually underperformed was Mika Galva. Ma was double eliminated every time. Didn't seem to really get any strong offense. Like just struggled in this rule set for some reason. Just didn't do well. And uh for the wild card, I would have told them, man, you would have been better off with one of your homegrown guys from New Wave because I think they would have had better submission odds. But he is facing a lot of tough guys, you know, so it's not like he had an easy run. Uh, but he didn't I don't think he lived up to the expectations that they were hoping for. Like a lot of people came in thinking like Mika is going to clean sweep somebody's team and like he couldn't get past one guy. Uh, so not great showing for him. But on BT side, Victor Hugo did the job that he needed to. He subbed two people by arm triangles, scored himself $100,000 and uh made B team have a good pass into the finals. The finals. Well, then we had the women's finals. Helena and Sarah Gabal. Helena Cravar played a very aggressive guard game was leading the dance uh winning every round that she did just by submission pressure. Had some decent looks, nothing serious. But in the third round, she was winning the first two rounds got a good bite at Aayoki Lock and was able to finish it, winning the biggest prize in women's grappling, $100,000 as a I think now she's 18 years old. So, a very impressive job by the young lady and congrats to her. She did what she was supposed to do. She went out there to finish and she scored the finish. Then we had the match with Craig Jones and Chill Sonnen, which we could have done without. Uh my wife was excited because she she likes Chel. She thinks he's funny. Uh but I'm like this is a total mismatch. You know, like Chale is not a good grappler. You know, he can in MMA even he his Achilles heel was jiu-jitsu and he's going to be fighting the second best jiu-jitsu guy in the world. I don't think that's going to work out. And sure enough, when the match starts, 30 seconds in, Craig Jones goes unconscious to a buggy choke. And it's like one of the most obvious buggy choke setups I've ever seen. It's clear to me that he's probably never seen a buggy joke before, which is, you know, he's retired. He's 48 years old. You know, I get it. But they end up restarting the match because Craig and not Craig Chale goes, "Oh, no. That didn't count." You know, let's do it again. So they continue the match and it goes a couple more minutes before he gets caught in another buggy choke and gets put unconscious yet a second time and it looked like he was trying to petition for a third one and as was the crowd but big John McCarthy was a referee was not having it. I think it was a terrible idea as well and just really a waste of the viewers time in my opinion. I mean, hopefully Chel got paid for good for it and made it worth his time, but seems like it's not a great look, you know? I wouldn't want to go out there just to get embarrassed that way. It seems like a bad way to like tarnish your legacy in my opinion, but it didn't really add anything to the viewers either. And uh I don't think it really does anything for Craig either in my opinion. And there's a lot of things about this event that I didn't like besides the pacing. a lot of wasted time. Like they had um Hanach, right? The guy who likes, you know, pretending to be a Brazilian guy and he has his stickick and it could be funny sometimes, but man, like it's kind of played out in my opinion and there were really some weird moments that they put together where they really like trying to like draw out the this comedy that he was doing. And it struck some people the wrong way because he was talking to Tom Debas and if you guys don't know Tom Debas is public with it that he was molested as a child and I forget how that that got brought out in the conversation which seems kind of wild to bring out in a light-hearted conversation and then in that she goes oh that means you must have been a very good-looking child right and Tom Deas is like what you Um, a lot of people are like, "Is this real? Like, did this guy just make a joke about being molested as a kid?" Uh, which seemed crazy, right? And Tom Bos said afterwards he wasn't offended by it. He understands that this guy is playing a joke and just roasting him and he's fine with it. But I don't know, it it was fine. I mean, I thought it was a little funny in a dark humor way, but they kept doing the same type of bits. And for me, like I just want the event to be done. Like I want to see matches, you know? So there's a lot of dead time between matches when it's a very long event. I feel like you got to freaking speed the thing up. Especially nowadays, most people have very short attention span. Don't draw out something that could be done in 2 hours to like 5 hours. It seems like a waste of viewer time. Like just streamline it. But they were doing lots of interviews, joke interviews, commercials, uh little video promos. They were killing a lot of time like they were needed time to to make and it's like you guys had so much time like you shouldn't be wasting it in my opinion. Again, that's is why like I'm happy I don't watch that event live. It's just I don't want to be sitting in an uncomfortable chair, bad view angles with nothing good to eat for like five or six hours. It's just seems like a terrible uh use of time. So anyhow, besides me being a kmagin hating on the event, finals come in place and I'm going to tell you right now, it is a very antilimatic final because the semifinals were good. There was some action, there were submissions, there was, you know, some twists and turns. The finals was five deadlock matches where everyone got double eliminated. Now, going into it, it seemed like it was going to be a win for New Wave because New Wave won three of the matches and then uh two of the matches were won by um B team. And the way that they announced the scoring when it goes to double elimination of the teams is that they will individually score each match in the 10point must system. So it could be a 10 nine, a 108 or a 107. And it was of the opinion of the commentators and myself that they new probably got two 10 9. Um, Bodoni definitely got a 10 nine. Um, Olivarez could argue a 108 because he was passing the guard multiple times. Uh, but didn't really have any strong submission attempts. So, they were saying probably 109, right? And, uh, I'm trying to remember the third match that they won. I'm trying to think cuz and this one mostly even matchups. You had Ethan Krellstein with Dorian Olivarez. Dorian was just outpacing him on top. We had uh Victor Hugo mismatch in size with Vagner Roachcha. Okay. And Vagner was pretty much playing spoiler and lost to Hugo. Hugo was able to get a takedown, take the back, and was dominating him. That might have been a 108. Uh but again, was there a clean submission? I'm not sure because they were trying to say the criteria was that you had to have a really strong submission attempt to get a 108. I don't think there was in that match. So, might have been another 109. Uh Luke, well, we'll get to that one later. So, there's those three and then there's two more who are the other guys from team New Wave because we had Bodoni, we had uh Olivarez, we have Luke Griffith, Man, I'm I'm I'm missing the middle guy here and I can't recall it. But I guess I'll continue. I'll talk about the last match because that was the match that was uh consequential because the last match was Luke Griffith and Nick Rodriguez and from my opinion and from the viewer and from the commentators they were in conc in concurrence that they needed a submission or a 108 potentially to draw or maybe win, right? Depending how the judges scored. But they were really pushing for a submission. Now the the submission didn't come, but Nick Rodriguez dominated positionally, although he never really had a good submission bite. He threatened a few headlocks, but never really had the position to finish it. So again, I don't know what the criteria is if it's a 109 or a 108, right? Because it's just domination positionally. And again, uh, it was a strange choice in my opinion to anchor the team with Luke because obviously, like I said, Luke gasped pretty early. Uh, so I would have not put him in the final position. I would have anchored with Boni. Boni's clutch and he's got a good gas tank. He's the most technically sound and he was a guy that wasn't breaking. So, I think that was a bad call from the coach's standpoint. But nevertheless, it was the call they made. So they had an interesting thing because at the end it seemed like they thought team Newable was going to win by like one point. It would have been like a 4746, something to that effect. But they actually said it was a 4747 and it was a three-way tie. All the judges scored the same, which is kind of crazy. So then it the tiebreaker they announced was the score of the final match and right away we knew well this is going to end with B team winning because Nikki Rod won that match and they ended up saying that was a 108 which is interesting because then you would have to score 108 Sidorian Olivarez right and some of the other guys. So, I'm not sure how they played out the scoring, right? I It left kind of a cheesy taste and you could see there was a lot of confused faces as they started playing the camera around. Uh Dan her didn't seem to really appreciate it and especially since B team is like Craig's team you could kind of say there might have been some favoritism here you know with how they decide to score or play the rules but regardless I mean you you let it get that close you can't be too upset uh and I think certain people didn't do their job you know in the team so when you Let it go to the scorecards. This is kind of what could happen to you. But not a great way to finish this show in my opinion. I'm going to say I hate this rule set. I think the quintetic sucks. I think using uh 10point mus system not great either. Uh, this is not MMA and these are not the good parts of MMA. You know, I just think it was not well executed. Especially when I compare this to PGF, which I've been watching, you know, as you guys been seeing me doing the breakdowns and whatnot. PGF blows this out of the water. And I know we're not talking about the best grappers in the world, but from an entertainment standpoint, it's far more entertaining. Far more entertaining. And there are a lot more matches. There's 45 matches on the days I've been going. And it takes them less than 4 hours. Whereas this is like 20 matches. Not even that. Well, now today's was like 14 match. Wait, no, five, 10, 12 matches. And it takes over four hours. It's just so slow the pacing. It's like dragging nails on a chalkboard for me. Like we got to speed this thing up, man. And uh yeah, I just don't like all the antics. I guess maybe it's the audience is not me, right? Like there's a lot of like jokes and crude stuff and I just don't care for it. It's like very played out to me, you know? I want to see the grappling. I want to see the martial arts. I want to see the action. And I don't think it brought it right. And especially when I compare it to an event very fresh in my mind, PGF, it brought the action. It was very exciting. And it had to use much less money to do so. So I don't I was telling my wife, I don't think this is going to be sustainable. I I don't know what the payout because they did change something because normally they were saying how this event's going to stream for free. It's going to be on YouTube. Everyone can watch it free. And apparently a couple days ago they kind of changed the idea and then they said, "Well, we're going to stream it live on YouTube through Flowgrappling and after the event's done live is going to be uh solely through a payw wall on Flow Grappling, which tells me then that the free money or the the money that behind the scenes got tired of losing money and they wanted to sell the streaming rights to recover some of the investment. Now, there were a ton of empty seats at the arena there. So, they didn't do good on ticket sales, not like last time. And I guess I don't know what the value of this for streaming rights would be. Like, how much money did flow grappling make off a YouTube stream? I know they were showing commercials or whatnot, but I don't know how much that's worth for how many viewers. They said they had over a million viewers on the first going, but uh which is great, but I don't know how much that's worth. Is that worth, you know, $2 or $3 million that they put on the budget for this? I have no idea. Um, it doesn't seem that sustainable. And even if it was, I think the rule set wasn't entertaining. They need to give up. This uh quintet thing doesn't really work the way they pulled it off. They need to. And I think it's interesting. I watched the debate that Mighty Mouse hosted between Mikey Musamechi and Craig Jones, uh, which was leading into this event. And what was funny was both of these guys were talking about how they know their sport inside and out and what would make for the best events. And Craig was critiquing UFC BJJ for being a monopoly, which I don't disagree with. He was also critiquing like saying, "Do you have the best people running it?" Claudrey Bedellia, he didn't seem to have a high opinion of her. But Mikey did bring up some good points. And he said, "The rule set you're using was copied, you know, from UFC's uh BJJ event, the 10point must system. That's a UFC creation. But now instead of five minutes they were using like you know eight minute rounds and the wall concept was from karate combat you know. So he didn't like he keeps saying like UFC copied him but he actually copied the UFC and he copied Karate Combat. The UFC might have saw the wall concept and thought, "Oh, this would be good because it takes away the thing." But at least they made their own version of the the wall. Uh, and perhaps it was inspired by the success of his event, but to say they copy you, no, they they saw what you did and they made it better in my opinion. And trust me, I'm not shilling for the UFC. I think I hate the their rule set as well, the three five minute rounds. It's like that's the worst part of MMA to in my opinion is the rounds and especially as a grappler, the worst thing is the fiveminute rounds because it screws up, you know, your development because it takes you a long time to get into these positions. Look, we have eight minute rounds with the best grapplers in the world and it's not enough time for the course submission. Now you're going to limit me to 5 minutes. How you think that's going to work? It's a thing to do in my opinion. So don't mistake me like defending UFC here because their rule sets their rule set in my opinion sucks, right? The three body rounds is garbage. Make it one round, right? That's it. It doesn't have to be that long. Again, short attention spans. One 10-minute round is plenty of time. One 8 minute round is plenty of time, right? Just make it one longer round and we'll be able to have the grappling develop a lot more than splitting it up. And we don't have to worry about goofy scorecards. Like if you have one round, you could just decide who won the round. That's it. All right. It's very simple criteria that way. But I think it's funny that we're we're trying to emulate MMA by grabbing the worst parts for grappling into the rule set. And you know, Craig has adopted some of that stuff in my opinion, which did not work out. Uh I think there has to be a lot more outside the box thinking. I do like what Brandon did with his event, like I said, with PGF. I know I've blown so much smoke up this guy's butt, but I think he deserved it. It was a very entertaining event. Honestly, the most entertaining grappling event I've been able to go to in person. Uh, very fun to watch and, you know, action was non-stop. So, he did everything right in my opinion. That eighth season, chef's kiss, right? Great. Uh, and I think more people should be paying attention to that. You want something that can go on TV? Great. Now, would I make changes to Brandon's format? For sure. All right. Uh, I think more brevity. Doing three blocks in one night is a lot of action. Again, I'm a hardcore, so as long as the action's, you know, going, you could pump through my veins, and I would stick there for that time. But would it be better if it was shorter? Especially if we're trying to put this online and stream it. Yeah, I think if you made it an hour, like you did just one block, it might be like an hour and a half. That's a lot more palatable and plus you get to stretch the season out a little bit more and better for the athletes. It's less strain, right? Um because the the three matches is basically the three blocks is 45 matches in one day. That's a lot of matches, right? And it's also becomes hard to remember. Like, look, I had a hard time remembering these matches and there's only 20 matches, right? It's a lot, right? In a fight card, we normally have nine fights. And sometimes we complain when there's more than nine fights. So, I think grappling needs to kind of dial it back a little bit more. I mean, we can fit more grappling matches in than MMA matches perhaps, but like let's be reasonable with expectations. And I think you have to respect the viewership time. Uh I don't want to be locked down for seven hours to watch something. And like this one, like I was even kind of like, ah, do I really have to watch this whole thing? I'm like, yeah, I'm going to talk about it. Let me do my due diligence and watch the whole event. Uh so um but I think it'll be better shorter. It's less is more, right? Make the quality of the event higher. You don't need as much time, right? you have like 10 banger matches, that's going to be way better than 30 shitty matches. That's my take on it, right? Um, strategically, the way the teams were used in CJI, like I said, I think the that final match, there was a mistake to put Luke as the anchor position. Like I could have told you he's going to lose against Nikki Rod and they if they were picking on the spot, which it was my understanding, I would have put uh Luke in first on the fourth position and then had Bodoni anchor, but they opted the other way around, I guess. And it would have been Luke versus Joseph Chen, which I think would have been favorable for Luke. huge size advantage. Probably be hard for Joseph to put away uh Luke. Luke has a chance of putting him away. At the very worst, Luke just loses, you know, a decision and that's about it. And Bodoni with Nick Rodriguez would have been a really interesting matchup. I think uh we would have would like to see how the wrestling would have developed there or Bodoni would have opted to play guard. So I think there was a strategic mismatch there some of the times like they were picking like I said very even right and I think it's becau and again I could be wrong but my understanding is they were allowed to pick on the spot so they were picking a lot of even matchups instead of a lot of mismatches. There was a few times they did mismatches which was smart. Uh like when they put Dorian against Felipe was wise. Why? Because Dorian, Filipe just beat Luke, but he had to fight for it. Being a big boy, he gets tired. They know Dorian has a gas tank and was just going to run a pace on him. And that's exactly what he did, right? And he just outworked him and uh was able to pass his guard and, you know, just big boy him, which for the smaller guy is crazy. So, there were some good uses of that type of strategy, but uh I think when it mattered, they they executed wrong in that final match. But easy for me to say from my armchair. But um in retrospect, you know, it's easier to make that call. But when I heard it, I was like, "No, this wasn't the call to make." If I knew if he and again, if I'm wrong then and they were locked in early, then well, I guess that's the hand you play. But if you had the choice of who you could put against Joseph Chen, Luke Griffith, or John Carlo Bodoni, I throw Luke Griffith in without hesitation because at the worst case scenario in my opinion would be a double elimination. Whereas uh and that would put me with Bodonia and Nick Rodriguez, which is a much better matchup. I feel like Nick's got cardio. He's got a good game. He's not going to get tired that easily. Whereas Luke showed pretty early that he was getting tired. And like the last person you want to be gassed with is Nick Rodriguez. So I think that was a strategic error on their part. Oh, I'm remembering the I'm still having trouble remembering that last matchup because there was five guys. I know one of the B team guys was Chris Wick and then New Wave. Man, we had Dorian, Ma, we had uh Vagner, John Carlo, and Luke. Yeah. So, I had all the guys. I just don't remember. Mika went against um WJ and also just he probably won. Yes, because he was on top the whole time, but didn't really do anything of substance and like um WJ wasn't able to get any bites on the legs at all, like zero, which was surprising. I thought he was going to get some type of entanglement. Never got it. But, uh, he had one position where he had an outside ankle catch, but he couldn't make it like develop it any further. But, uh, yeah, kind of a bummer of event in my mind like, and I kind of knew it going into it, which is why I didn't go, but I was hoping to be wrong. I'd rather be wrong about this thing and the event just be a smash success. another place to watch grappling, another venue for people to make a lot of money like and you know B team picked up another million dollars, you know, Victor Hugo picked up 100 grand and you know a bunch of people picked up money so great. I'm happy for them you know but as far as the way the event is run, the way the pacing is, the rule set, to me it all sucks. Not a fan of CJI. Uh, and you guys know I'm not a fan of a lot of rules. I don't like the ADCC rule set. I think it sucks, but it's better than the CGI rule set in my opinion. Uh, which is not saying a lot, right? Because I think there's a lot of flaws and I've already talked about them, you know, to death. So, I'll stop there. But that's my take. Day two was definitely better than day one. Semi-finals was good. If you want to watch some good action, watch the semi-finals. There was some cool matches there. Um, but the finals pretty terrible. Nothing really happened. A lot of stalemated matches or just one guy getting dominated the whole time. Day one pretty terrible. Just skip it all together. Maybe just watch the women's matches. Uh, but other than that, yeah, not a great event. I, like I said, I'm glad I didn't pay for this event. I'm glad I didn't watch it. I would be very upset. And, uh, I think they need to definitely re, if they're going to do a a third event, they need to restructure the whole thing. Scrap whatever you did this time around, re go back to the drawing board. you were better off with the previous format in my opinion, which I wasn't a fan of either, but it was better than what you did now. Um, and kill the rounds, man. I don't think you had a lot of MMA casuals watching this event. So, stop trying to make a role set to cater to them. I think there's this idea because the UFC thought about it like, oh, you know, if we make three, five minute rounds and do 10point muscle system, the MMA fans will watch this. I honestly don't think the MMA fans are going to watch this. If you're a jiu-jitsu head, you're going to watch it. And obviously, there's a big crossover between jiu-jitsu heads and MMA fans. And I think they're mistaking, oh, like, oh, we have people watching because it's the rule sets the same. No, it's not. It's because they're a jiu-jitsu fan. They'll watch MMA and jiu-jitsu and they watch jiu-jitsu in jiu-jitsu. Like, they don't care. Like, use a better rule set. Don't lean on old rules that don't apply to our sport. Our sport needs time to develop. You need to have the right incentive structures in place to motivate people to go for submissions. That's what PGF has done very well. They made short rounds. They made the only win condition. and you need to score enough points to get into the playoffs. So the incentive structure is if you want to make real money, you have to get submissions. If you don't, it doesn't matter if you totally dominate the guy, you're going home empty. That make and it's a short round. So I could sprint the whole time and not worry about gassing since it's six-minute round. Very well thought out of. And mind you, their rules have adapted a lot because this is the eighth season and they they have played with different rule sets over all these seasons. So I like that Brandon was thinking and adapting. He's like, "Okay, this rule set had these flaws. This rule set and I'm sure after this a season they're going to make some adapters because there were some things that were kind of sketchy uh for PGF like this turtle like whenever you turtle you don't get called for stalling. That was kind of BS. So they need to adapt, but they are not being stuck into old paradigms like they're they're they're moving around. So I have faith in McCarron and what he's doing there, but uh CGI has to adapt too. Like you have and I know that Craig made some audables with, you know, he can't change the rule set mid event and at least he was able to throw some incentive for some missions to throw money in, but a little disappointed in the execution of this event, right? like especially with the amount of trash he was talking about the UFC event. The UFC events were more entertaining than this which uh when I attended the Fight Pass Invitational Live, they're very fun to watch and they were higher pace action. So, you kind of miss the the I mean besides you had the the big million dollar prize, so obviously that means a lot. But outside of that, you didn't live up to the the billing in my opinion. Anyhow, you guys can give me your thoughts. Am I being too hard on them or am I on the money? You can leave me a comment or send me an email. Other than that, I'll see you guys next