William Tackett Caught Biting Rocha On Camera — UFC BJJ Has Not Issued A Statement, A Fine, Or Even A Raised Eyebrow

William Tackett retained his UFC BJJ welterweight title on April 2, 2026, with a unanimous decision over Vagner Rocha at the Meta APEX in Las Vegas. The match itself looked clean enough on the surface. Three rounds of work. Two takedowns. A slick back take in the third round. Exactly what you'd expect from the promotion's only champion who actually defends his belt with any regularity.

Then the footage came out, and everything fell apart.

Video surfaced showing Tackett—the 22-year-old face of UFC BJJ's welterweight division—biting Rocha during the match. Not ambiguous camera-angle stuff. Not the kind of grainy footage that sparks debate in comment sections. Clear as the mat they were rolling on. You could see the contact. You could see the mechanics. It was there. Multiple angles confirmed it. The bite was visible enough that highlight reels included it without editorializing.

Tackett's first response on social media came without hesitation: "That's what you get for the oil check, Vagner. Keep it clean kids."

His follow-up was equally dismissive: "I don't encourage biting. I shouldn't have done it, but it is still funny."

So the reigning UFC BJJ welterweight champion was, on the record, acknowledging he bit his opponent during a title fight. With a music-backed post and a shrug where any semblance of remorse should have lived. The posts sat there for days. No deletion. No apology. No walk-back. Just a champion laughing about biting someone on live television, defending the act as some kind of proportional response to whatever Rocha had supposedly done.

UFC BJJ? They said nothing. No statement. No review. No fine. No disciplinary hearing. Not even one of those boilerplate PR responses about "reviewing the matter internally." Just silence—the kind that speaks volumes about how seriously the promotion took competitive integrity when the person doing the biting was also the guy they were building their welterweight division around.

This wasn't locker room nonsense or the kind of minor infraction that gets buried in procedural fine print. There was real context that made the silence particularly damning.

Tackett was 22 years old at the time of the bite, and he was the promotion's golden child in every sense. He was the inaugural welterweight champion, undefeated, with three first-round submissions on his title defense record before facing Rocha. His resume read like a promotional dream: he heel-hooked Elijah Dorsey, D'Arce'd Renato Canuto, and rear-naked-choked Andy Varela for the inaugural belt. Three title fights, three finishes, all concluded in the first round. He was the success story that UFC BJJ pointed to when defending the legitimacy of what they were building. He was on track to become the defining figure of their early competitive era.

Vagner Rocha was something else entirely: 43 years old, a late replacement who only got the title shot because Tackett had rejected the actual contender, Yuto Murasaki. Murasaki was a two-time Pan champion who had armbarred his way into serious consideration in the first round at UFC BJJ 5. But Tackett apparently said no. So Rocha got the call instead—a man who had never fought in UFC BJJ before. A man who had suffered a heart failure episode in January 2025. A man who was coaching his daughter when the offer came through. He got the shot because he was sitting in the arena that day and because, according to some reports, twenty other potential challengers had already turned it down. The matchmaking smelled like a corporate gift-wrap from the start.

The matchmaking was questionable on its face. It looked like a favor to the champion—a way to let Tackett rack up another first-round finish against someone who didn't have the pedigree to make it competitive. That was the setup before the bite ever happened. Rocha was cast as the stepping stone, not the challenger. A warm body who'd been rejected by everyone else and only got the call because of logistics and roster availability.

Then Tackett bit him. On camera. During a UFC BJJ broadcast. Acknowledged it afterward. Laughed about it publicly. And the promotion's official response was to pretend it didn't happen.

The hypocrisy of the silence was what made it sting most.

This was the same UFC BJJ that announced plans to drug test title fighters—that wanted to be taken seriously as a regulated competitive organization with actual standards. This was the same promotion booking Tsarukyan vs. Musumeci superfights to prove it belonged in conversation with ADCC and the Combat Jiu-Jitsu International circuit. This was the same organization that had spent months making the case that it should be considered a legitimate grappling promotion and not just a UFC side project with mats and broadcast equipment. They had positioned themselves as the future of competitive jiu-jitsu, backed by capital and broadcast infrastructure that no other promotion could match.

And yet when their champion bit someone during a title fight, they handled it the way a gym handles a sparring incident—which is to say, they didn't handle it at all.

To understand how far out of step this response was, you only had to imagine the alternative scenarios. If Rocha had bitten Tackett, the outcry would have been immediate and volcanic. The narrative would have framed an older fighter as dirty, reckless, out of control. If this had happened at an ADCC event, there would have been a disqualification on the spot and a review committee convened before Monday morning. If it had happened at a local NAGA event, the referee would have stopped the match right there and issued a report. If it had happened at CJI or any other competition with actual rulebooks and enforcement mechanisms, there would have been a paper trail: incident report, investigation, disciplinary action. Standard procedure. Standard accountability.

But at UFC BJJ, the champion bit. The camera caught it. The champion laughed about it on social media. And the promotion's official position, delivered through the absence of any statement whatsoever, was that this apparently wasn't worth acknowledging. It wasn't worth reviewing. It wasn't worth fining. It wasn't even worth a formal response. The message was crystal clear: this is what you get when you step in the cage against our guy. The unspoken policy became the actual policy.

Nothing changed. No fine was issued. No hearing was held. No policy was clarified. Tackett still held the title. Rocha had disappeared back into obscurity. And UFC BJJ moved on to the next event like the bite never happened.

This was supposed to be the sport's newest legitimate promotion. The one that would elevate grappling through capital and infrastructure and international broadcasting. The one that would make jiu-jitsu a televised competitive event that mattered. The one that would be taken seriously on the world stage. But when tested—when the actual rules had to be applied and competitive integrity had to be defended—they failed the most basic test. They looked the other way when it was inconvenient to look anywhere else.

That's not how you build a legitimate sport. That's how you prove you're not one.

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

Sources

• Andrew Tackett Bit Vagner Rocha — And That's Now Bigger Than His UFC BJJ 7 Win
• Andrew Tackett reacts to evidence he bit Vagner Rocha
• UFC BJJ 7: Tackett vs Rocha Results
• Andrew Tackett Confirms UFC BJJ Will Begin Drug Testing
• Andrew Tackett decisions Vagner Rocha — Yahoo Sports