Simple Man Martial Arts Rebranded—But the MMA Gym Vision Never Materialized

On July 24, 2025, with Craig Jones already publicly halfway out the door, the remaining principals of B-Team Jiu-Jitsu sat down on their own podcast and announced the future. They were going to be a full MMA gym. Striking. Padwork. Wrestling. Kids' classes. A family-friendly martial arts campus in a town that, by their own count, had plenty of jiu-jitsu academies and plenty of UFC fighters but no high-level MMA gym to bridge the two.

"There's not too many like full MMA gyms in Austin," Nicky Ryan said on the Simple Man podcast. "There's a lot of Jiu-Jitsu gyms but there's not really any like super high-level MMA gyms." Damien Anderson laid out the family-gym framing: "We want to rebrand to a family gym where we can focus on the next generation of athletes and have like full encompassing martial arts. It'll be striking, wrestling, grappling…" Nick Rodriguez covered the hiring plan: "We'll specialise obviously in Jiu-Jitsu but when we're ready for the expansion of other martial arts like striking, we'll make sure that we have somebody who's absolutely one of the best coaches in the world."

It was a coherent pitch. The timing made sense. Jones was already telling anyone who would listen that "running a gym sucks, you know? I guess it's kind of all the worst parts of being a promoter as well," and that he was "just passing the torch on to them." After CJI 2 wrapped at the end of August, Jones formally closed B-Team. On September 4, 2025, the rebrand to Simple Man Martial Arts went official, with Nicky Ryan installed as head coach and the four remaining principals (Ryan, Nick Rodriguez, Ethan Crelinsten, and Damien Anderson) running the show.

By the following spring, nine months into the venture, the gym's website told a different story. The entire program list read: Adult Jiu-Jitsu. Youth Jiu-Jitsu. That was the schedule. The "What Is Simple Man Martial Arts" page described the place as "the evolution of B-Team Jiu Jitsu" with a mission to help "every student reach their highest potential through the art of Jiu Jitsu." Singular art. Jiu jitsu. No striking on the menu. No padwork hour. No wrestling-only slate beyond what was already baked into the no-gi curriculum. No "one of the best coaches in the world" hired for a striking program, at least not one anyone bothered to put on the website.

For a brand whose stated identity now included the words "Martial Arts" in place of "Jiu Jitsu," this was, somehow, a place that taught exactly one martial art.

To be fair to the four of them, opening an MMA gym is not the same as opening a jiu-jitsu gym. A jiu-jitsu gym is mats, a coach, and a wall to lean against. An MMA gym is mats, a cage, a heavy bag rack, a coach for striking, a coach for wrestling, somebody who can call a corner, somebody who can put a fight together, and a liability waiver thick enough to stop a body kick. The principals can grapple. Two of them had won CJI 2 with the rest of the B-Team crew. Ryan had spent the prior year picking apart UFC BJJ matches on YouTube. Crelinsten had Polaris belts to defend. None of them had ever been a head striking coach, and none of them had publicly announced one.

So either the buildout would take longer than the announcement made it sound, or the "MMA gym" framing was always going to live in the marketing copy first and the schedule somewhere down the line. Both were possible. Both happened all the time. The gap between a gym's announced expansion and its actual class schedule tended to get measured in years, not months. Standing up a striking program inside a grappling academy was a different business: different gear, different liability, different coaching tree, different students. The "we'll add MMA" plan rarely shipped on the timeline it got announced on.

What was a little odder was the family-gym piece. Anderson had made a point of saying the rebrand was about the next generation, kids' programs, the everybody-welcome positioning. That was a real move when it actually happened. It changed who walked through the door at 6:30 on a Tuesday, and it changed what the place felt like at the front desk. Simple Man did have a Youth Jiu-Jitsu offering, and from what was public it looked like a perfectly reasonable kids' program. It was also the entire family-friendly buildout, nine months in.

Meanwhile, the gym remained recognizably the gym it had been before the rebrand. The vlog was called "Simple Man Martial Arts Vlog" but the content was ADCC West Coast Trials camp, Ryan breaking down UFC BJJ matches, Crelinsten prepping a Polaris title defense. Grappling content, made by grapplers, for grapplers. Which was fine. That was the audience that built the place. It was just not what had been advertised.

The cleanest read on all this was the Craig Jones one. Jones had said his marketing put him at the front of a crew that didn't need him there, and that the right move was to step aside and let the four of them build their own brand. Nine months in, the brand they were building looked a lot like a slightly less meme-poisoned version of the brand he had stepped away from. Same building. Mostly the same coaches. Mostly the same competitors. Mostly the same media. The MMA pivot was nowhere to be found. The family gym was a kids' class.

This wasn't a failure. It was a reminder that podcast announcements are a different genre than gym buildouts, and that a rebrand is a logo change until somebody actually hires a striking coach. The remaining principals had done the easy half of the pivot: the name, the website, the podcast tie-in. The hard half is the second discipline, the second coach, the second culture sharing the same building. That one takes years and money and a willingness to be visibly bad at something in front of your own students.

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

Sources

• B-Team Jiu-Jitsu Shifts Focus To MMA After Craig Jones' Departure (BJJEE)
• B-Team Jiu-Jitsu Officially Rebrands As Simple Man Martial Arts (BJJEE)
• Craig Jones Explains Why He Left B-Team Jiu-Jitsu: 'Running A Gym Sucks, You Know?' (BJJEE)
• What Is Simple Man Martial Arts (Official Site)
• B Team Jiu Jitsu (Wikipedia)