I Saw Mike Israetel Compete as a Brown Belt. Here's My Actual Take.

Why I'm Even Talking About This

I'm a brown belt. I've competed. I've coached. I've rolled with people across a significant range of skill levels from white belt through black belt. When a controversy like this surfaces — is Mike Israetel actually a black belt? — I have something most of the people commenting on it don't have: a frame of reference that isn't just watching YouTube clips.

I also have something more specific than that. I actually saw Mike Israetel at a competition when he was a brown belt, about three years ago. Not just a video. In person. I was coaching one of my guys at a tournament in the mid-Atlantic — DC or Maryland area, where everyone from the Northeast ends up eventually — and Israetel was there with his coach.

So let me tell you what I actually saw, and then let me tell you why the internet's hot take is, in my view, mostly wrong.

What I Saw in Person

Israetel was wearing a rash guard that signaled his rank — brown belt at the time. His coach was standing next to him. Both of them were, and I say this with complete sincerity, absolute units of human beings. I've been to the Arnold Classic. I've been around big people. I've never seen someone that short and that wide. His coach was a leaner, more muscular version of the same general body type — and the coach had a competitor entered in the no-gi division who ended up rolling against the guy I brought.

I brought a white belt. A talented white belt — someone with around 60 wins at white belt, which was enough to get him pushed up to compete in the blue belt division. Still a white belt, but genuinely skilled.

We lost. Not close. His coach's student handled us. And that's the most important data point in this entire discussion. If a coach is running a black belt mill — just handing out belts based on time in grade and tuition paid — his blue belts don't look like that. They don't go into competition and dominate talented white-belt-class competitors. The teaching is either working or it isn't. Based on what I saw from that one student, the teaching is working.

The Greg Doucette Take Was Just Wrong

I'll be direct about this. Greg Doucette made a video going after Israetel's jiu-jitsu, using the Johnny Shreve sparring footage as evidence. His argument: it took Israetel over three and a half minutes to "take out" Shreve, which he presented as evidence of poor skill.

Anyone who trains jiu-jitsu can identify several problems with this analysis.

First, that footage is *sparring*, not a match. Israetel is visibly goofing around in portions of it. He's using unusual sweeps, trying different positions, being playful. This is what high-level practitioners do in low-stakes rolls. If I rolled with a white belt and spent the whole time trying to hit a berimbolo, you could film it and make me look terrible. That wouldn't mean I couldn't submit them in ten seconds if I decided to.

Second, Johnny Shreve is not small. Not by any measure. Doucette claimed Israetel outweighed him by 50 pounds in that video. I don't think that's true. Shreve is a big, strong guy. Rolling with someone his size — at Israetel's weight — and "taking three and a half minutes" while trying advanced techniques and having fun is not an indictment of your belt. It's sparring.

Third — and this is the one that really matters — when your cardio starts going and you're a heavy guy, you get sloppier. That's not a belt level critique. That's a cardiovascular fitness critique. Those are different things. You can be a legitimate black belt and also not be in competition-ready shape. I've experienced this firsthand.

The Ariel Helwani Take Was Worse

Helwani commented — in reference to Derek Moneyberg, not Israetel specifically — that anyone should be able to last 30 seconds against Gordon Ryan. The implication being that Moneyberg's claim of not lasting 30 seconds against Nicky Ryan (who Helwani seemed to conflate with Gordon) was ridiculous.

Helwani has been commentating MMA and covering grappling for years. If you've done that for years and you still think a recreational practitioner should be able to last 30 seconds against Gordon Ryan in a jiu-jitsu match, you don't understand jiu-jitsu.

Gordon Ryan has submitted world champions in under 30 seconds. His ability to take the match to the ground, establish a position, and finish is not comparable to anything in the MMA context where you could theoretically circle and survive for 30 seconds. In pure jiu-jitsu, if Gordon Ryan decides the match is over, it's over in seconds. Full stop.

He's thinking about it like an MMA commentator: you can dance around, tie up, create chaos, survive. Jiu-jitsu doesn't give you those outs once someone at that level gets a hold of you. And he should know this.

The Craig Jones Principle

Craig Jones has talked publicly about something I think applies directly here. At seminars, he'll go through a line of practitioners to roll with — purples, browns, and blacks tend to put themselves at the front, because they want to test themselves against the best version of him when he's fresh. Blues sometimes put themselves at the end of the line.

That end-of-line blue belt, Craig says, is the one he's wary of. Fresh against a tired Craig Jones, with the specific goal of winning, that person is dangerous. And sometimes they win.

This is Craig Jones — one of the top five jiu-jitsu practitioners on the planet — acknowledging he can be beaten by a blue belt under specific circumstances. So for anyone to call Mike Israetel "upper blue belt level" as a critique, understand what they're actually saying: they're saying he's at the level where, on a bad day, he could lose to a blue belt. Which is true of literally everyone outside the top ten in the world.

My Own Competition Context

I competed recently — first tournament back after my second child. I went in without a proper training camp, banged up, and with less competition prep than I've done at any previous belt level. Here's what happened:

In the absolute no-gi cash prize division, I got launched off the mat and onto the concrete on the very first exchange. The guy started the takedown from inside the circle, launched me, and I literally landed on concrete. No damage, restarted, kept going. Lost that match in overtime because I gassed — he was in competition shape, I wasn't, and overtime is first-takedown-wins, which strongly favors the guy whose cardio is intact.

I also won two matches with submissions, including hitting my reverse triangle from the receiving end of a north-south choke attempt — a late-match desperation move that I've drilled specifically because I knew it could work in that scramble.

Point being: even with a broken finger going in and no training camp, I can show flashes of the technical level I've built over years of training. Taking the wrong clip of any of those matches and analyzing it out of context would make me look like an upper blue belt on some exchanges and like a brown belt on others.

That's how jiu-jitsu works. You need sustained footage of someone actually trying, across different opponents, at different levels of fatigue. Not a sparring clip from a YouTube video where they're visibly playing around.

The Moneyberg Distinction

Here's where I'll separate the two cases. Derek Moneyberg's black belt in three years — without any competition — deserves more scrutiny than what Israetel has received. Three years is exceptionally fast. BJ Penn got a black belt quickly and he's arguably one of the greatest jiu-jitsu players in MMA history. That's the standard you're implicitly holding yourself to when you take a black belt that fast without competition results.

Mike Israetel reportedly trained for around ten years to get his black belt. That timeline, plus the footage of him in live rolls, plus what I saw in person at that competition — his coach's caliber, his coach's student's caliber — doesn't add up to a fraudulent promotion. It adds up to a heavy guy who's legitimately skilled and not in competition shape.

Those are not the same thing. And the internet keeps confusing them.