Mikey Musumeci: Why Grappling Is Dying Before ADCC

On September 3rd, one week out from ADCC, Mikey Musumeci gave an interview that landed like a depressing reality check: "The state of grappling is really bad right now."

He wasn't being melodramatic. He was being precise. And that's the problem.

Musumeci spoke from experience. He's lived at the sport's peak. No-gi grappling had a golden window—five, maybe six years—because a small group of athletes carried the entire thing. Gordon Ryan. Craig Jones. The Ruotolo twins. And himself. Four names. That was the engine. The energy, the storylines, the reason casual fans tuned in—it all flowed from those four competing, winning, talking shit, and pushing each other.

Then they stopped.

Gordon Ryan retired from competition. Craig Jones stepped back. The Ruotolos went all-in on MMA. Musumeci's still competing, still dangerous, but he's watching the sport flatten out. The buzz is gone. ADCC no longer feels like the event it was. The dry spell is real.

What makes this sharp: Musumeci isn't blaming the federation or some conspiracy. He's saying the athletes who built the momentum walked away. And now no one's generating the same pull.

The Boom (and why it was so easy)

No-gi grappling exploded for specific reasons. It rode a cultural moment when submission wrestling looked like the future of MMA, when leg locks went mainstream, when FloGrappling made tournaments accessible. But underneath all that was one thing: the best guys in the world were competing against each other, constantly, for real stakes.

Gordon Ryan's dominance. Craig Jones's guard passes and smashing pressure. Kade and Tye Ruotolo's precocious talent and sibling drama. Mikey Musumeci as the technical standard—the guy who made everyone else sharper just by showing up. These weren't just names on a scorecard. They were personalities in a compressed narrative. Fans had beef to follow. Techniques to break down. Training footage to analyze. The sport generated its own content because the competitors generated drama naturally.

That ecosystem was fragile.

The Collapse (quiet, invisible, total)

What's brutal about Musumeci's take: the collapse was quiet. No scandal. No rule change. No shock. The athletes just left.

Gordon Ryan stopped competing. He'd won enough, proved what he needed to. Made the pivot to gym ownership and online content. Fair. Legitimate. But once he stepped away, everything else started drifting.

Craig Jones stepped back too—less dramatic, same result. When you're not competing at the highest level, you're not part of the conversations that drive engagement. You can be influential in retrospect, but you're out of the moment.

The Ruotolos went to MMA. Still grapplers, still dangerous, but they're in MMA now—and that's a different audience. A sub in the octagon plays different than a sub at ADCC. One reaches hundreds of thousands. The other reaches the core crew. Both matter. But one reaches more people.

Musumeci kept competing. He's won ADCC medals. He's still showing up. But one guy—even a great one—can't replace what four top competitors create together. The sport doesn't work that way. Drama requires contrast. You need new angles, new storylines, new challengers trying to prove something.

What Changed (everything and nothing)

On paper, nothing broke. ADCC still runs. FloGrappling still streams. Tournaments still happen. Rules haven't shifted. The talent base is deeper than ever. The technical level is higher.

But good grappling isn't the same as engagement. A tournament where the favorite wins decisively by advantages, where there's no grudge, no obvious next challenger—that's a tournament. A tournament with a narrative, with uncertainty, with athletes the audience cares about—that's an event.

Musumeci's saying grappling went from events to tournaments. And people can feel it.

The Irony (and it cuts both ways)

Here's what's interesting: Musumeci's diagnosing a problem he helped create.

He's not wrong. The athletes who drove the boom could've sustained it longer. But they didn't have to. Gordon Ryan decided he'd done enough. Craig Jones invested elsewhere. The Ruotolos chased the bigger payday and broader audience MMA offers.

All rational decisions. All devastating for the sport's narrative momentum.

The counter-argument's obvious: why stay in a sport that doesn't pay if you've already won everything and can make more money elsewhere? That's not a failure of the athletes. That's a failure of the sport to create economic incentives that keep talent competing.

But Musumeci wasn't saying that. His point was simpler: the sport's energy died when the people carrying it left. And he's right.

What Happens Now (the week before ADCC)

The timing's almost too perfect. One week before ADCC, the biggest tournament of the year, Musumeci says the sport's "really bad." That's not confidence. That's a warning.

Will ADCC 2026 be good? Probably. The grappling at the highest level is spectacular. The technique, fitness, problem-solving—it's elite.

But will it feel the same? Will it have the narrative momentum that keeps casual fans up past midnight? Will it generate the water-cooler conversations? Musumeci seems to think no.

He might be pessimistic. He might be underestimating the talent stepping up. New athletes always emerge. Narratives always shift. Maybe someone at ADCC this week writes a new story.

But he's not wrong about the moment. No-gi grappling was riding a wave created by a specific group of athletes at a specific moment. That window closed. Now the sport's figuring out what comes next.

The Real Problem

Musumeci's diagnosis points to something structural: top-level grappling depends on a small number of people. It requires athletes good enough to draw attention, competitive enough to create drama, committed enough to keep showing up.

That's different from sports with broader fan bases, deeper money, and more distributed narratives. In grappling, you can lose your entire audience's engagement if three or four people step away.

Musumeci's right—the sport is in a dry spell. The real question: can the sport generate momentum from who's here now, or is it waiting for the old guard to come back?

Given that Gordon Ryan is busy building New Wave Jiu-Jitsu, Craig Jones is doing his thing off the circuit, and the Ruotolos are in MMA, that second option looks like a long shot.

One week before ADCC, the guy still competing, still winning, still invested in the sport's future is telling you it's dying. That's not pessimism. That's clarity. And that's the last thing you want to hear.

This post was generated by AI. Sources are linked below. Follow @bjj-problems on YouTube for the weekly video digest.

Sources

• Mikey Musumeci Interview - September 3, 2026
• ADCC 2026 Tournament - September 10-12