- 99kg had quite a few new faces and there were all sorts of question marks around it coming into ADCC. Is Craig Jones too small for this division? Is Nicholas Meregali ready for ADCC? Has Kaynan fixed his leg lock defense? Can Lovato Jr. still hang with the young guys? These all got answered and we can now talk about what happened in the matches. Let's check out the stats.
The submissions were split evenly between chokes and arm locks. One of the strange things about this division is that there weren't many submissions attempted. There wasn't a single submission I saw that was attempted more than twice. The Ezekiel was attempted twice, but it was by Craig Jones when he was mounted by Kaynan Duarte. 2 of the subs came from the top position, 1 came from the bottom and the final one came from a neutral position. As expected playing from the top was the key to victory in this division.
There were quite a few sweeps in this division and it was nice to see the variety show here. The most common was the bodylock, which was more of a sweep finish than an actual sweep. In fact in this division wrestling up seemed to be a fairly sound strategy. Something I should mention is that the tripod sweep here was actually the RDLR swing tripod style sweep popularized by Keenan which can be seen here.
There were a few passes in this division, but the most common was the half guard pass. If you could 3/4 mount passes as halfguard passes you'd have 4. With the exception of the toreando all of them are pressure based passes. I believe that in this division the lack of speed and the extra weight makes pressure passes much more attractive compared to speed passes. This division featured a lot of people going for the bodylock pass. A few of those time they switched to half guard passing and finished from there, so the stats don't tell the whole story.
I was actually surprised with the lack of takedowns in this division. I think many people spent too much time hand fighting and ended up tiring themselves out. Surprisingly there were no single leg takedowns in this division despite the fact that it was attempted so often. I believe this was due to people attempting them too late in the match when they were completely exhausted and desperate to score.
The most common finishing position was the back, but really there was only 1 finish from a dominant position. People were using mount a bit more in this division. I was a bit surprised by the use of the saddle, but I think this division might be more susceptible to heelhooks than the other divisions, so using the saddle might have been the correct strategic choice even though it didn't seem to work the 2 times people got there. I also thought the mount would be more effective as a finishing position, but I beleive at least 2 of the times mount was achieved it was by Kaynan vs Craig Jones. Kaynan himself said he was playing conservatively, so I'm guessing that is part of the reason that such a dominant position wasn't converted into a submission.
Although this division wasn't terrible, it was somewhat underwhelming. Kaynan is such a force in this division, but he didn't want to open up his game. He won in the most conservative way possible and he wasn't alone in that. There were some bright spots though and lots of good action through the matches. Craig Jones showed he could hang in a higher weight class and Nicholas Meregali made a very successful ADCC debut. This division seems to have been overlooked this year, but there are a few gems in here that everyone should check out.
If you haven't seen the other breakdowns check them out below.
As expected this division didn't have as much action as some of the others. However there were of course some exceptions. Craig Jones accounted for 2 of the submissions and the others came from Raphael Lovato Jr. and Nicholas Meregali. Unfortunately many of the wins came by decision which IMO is disappointing. In general there wasn't a lot of scoring in this division. Many of the matches were long grinding affairs involving wrestling and sweep/pass battles.
Submissions
Sweeps
In this division the competitors weren't that aggressive from guard. There was a quite a bit of "half guard grinding" that didn't lead anywhere. Although I understand why some people didn't open up their games, I wen this division it most likely caused them to lose.
Guard Passes
Takedowns
Positions
Overall
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