Originally Posted by
Ben Eddy
I think it's pretty debatable if the people you have pointed out had "unpassable guards" or not, but that debate actually doesn't matter. What you are not taking into account is the key factor here is that those practitioners didn't run into other competitors who also had unpassable guards. That's the problem. There are quite a few people today with unpassable guards. When two of these people go against each other, what do you expect is going to happen? No matter what ruleset they decide to compete against each other under, it does not matter, neither will be able to progress to a position where they can submit the other one.
Now we do sometimes see back takes in scrambles, and we can see subs from guard. But generally when two people at an elite level today meet, nothing happens because nothing can happen. Neither is unable to make progression.
And why did people start doing this in your mind vs not doing it back then? JJ practicioners of today just have no morals? They only care about "winning"? This is just a short sighted view of what has happened to competition JJ.
Try and run your mind through the idea that you are an elite level grappler and you have the NoGi worlds coming up. You are creating your strategy for how you plan to win. You know the last two times you competed, you spent 10 mins trying everything you could to pass Miyao's guard and were unsuccessful at even getting an advantage for an almost pass. How are you going to change your game from knowing this? You're just not going to change your game? Because you "respect the sport"? Does it even matter if you take this stance? From the viewers stand point, no matter what it will be a boring match. It will either be a boring event of one JJ practitioner spending 10 mins making 0 progress trying to pass the guard or it will be 10 mins of two competitors constantly looking at the scoreboard playing a strategic game of double guard pulls and advantages.
This is the reality of the skill levels current elite level JJ guys are at.
Not sure how you're rationalizing this argument. It's not really an argument of whether or not he lost because of the EBI overtime rounds.. It's just a fact. He went to overtime and lost during those rounds. His opponent also tried to find subs, could not, but still won. I'm not saying I don't like that. I enjoyed watching it.