SCOTTSDALE, AZ — Sources at Iron Triangle Jiu-Jitsu have confirmed that Tuesday night’s no-gi class has devolved into what one purple belt describes as “seven simultaneous Gordon Ryan cosplays happening on a single mat.”
“Everyone’s doing the body lock pass,” said head coach Marcus Webb, 43, who has taught no-gi classes at the gym for nine years and says he has never seen this many mounted triangles attempted in a single round. “Nobody’s hitting them. But everyone’s trying them. From everywhere. Standing, kneeling, bottom — I watched a white belt attempt a mounted triangle from inside someone else’s closed guard last week. I don’t know how that’s physically possible and I don’t want to.”
The phenomenon, which Webb estimates began approximately two BJJ Fanatics instructionals ago, has resulted in a class where all seven students play a near-identical game: underhook to body lock, attempt the pass, fail, pull half guard, hunt a leg, and then stare at each other from matching 50/50 positions for three minutes until the timer goes off.
“It’s like watching seven mirrors fight each other,” said visiting brown belt Diana Reyes, who attended the class once and has not returned. “Nobody can submit anyone because they all know exactly what’s coming. Everyone’s watched the same six hours of instructional. It’s a hive mind. A slow, heavy, very sweaty hive mind.”
When asked whether he’s considered introducing different techniques to diversify the class, Webb paused for several seconds. “I showed a loop choke last month,” he said. “They all looked at me like I’d suggested we try karate. One of them asked if it was ‘competition viable.’ I’ve been teaching for nine years.”
The situation has reportedly been compounded by the fact that three of the seven students now refer to their training philosophy as “systematic jiu-jitsu,” despite none of them being able to define what that means when pressed. One student, a two-stripe blue belt, was overheard explaining to a new member that “position before submission is outdated thinking,” approximately forty-five seconds before being swept and held in side control for the remainder of the round.
Webb confirmed that he has no plans to change the class structure, noting that attendance is consistent and that all seven students “seem bought in on their gameplan.” He did, however, admit to watching gi instructionals alone in his office after class “just to remember that spider guard exists.”
One of the seven students had posted a training highlight reel to Instagram set to electronic music, captioned “the system works,” over footage of a five-minute round in which nothing happened.