Claudia Gadelha stood in front of the media scrum at the UFC BJJ press conference and did what she does best: she went on the offensive before anyone could suggest her new promotion was picking a battle with the two biggest names in grappling.
Asked directly whether UFC BJJ’s new Opens series puts the promotion in direct competition with ADCC or the IBJJF, Gadelha rejected the premise outright.
“No, we have a really good relationship with ADCC, with IBJJF. I think we need every other organization out there. We don’t want to compete against them. We just want to train athletes to perform inside the Bowl,” Gadelha said.
“And like I said, athletes will always perform the way they train. And if we have kids and any other athlete that wants to be here training and competing and practicing what they have to do inside the Bowl when they get here, they’ll be ready for that.”
It was a diplomatic answer, but it landed at an awkward moment. Just days earlier, Jay Rodriguez had pulled his name from the ADCC roster, and the timing lined up neatly enough with his arrival at UFC BJJ that fans connected the dots on their own.
Gadelha confirmed the connection herself, walking through how the signing actually came together.
“Yeah, very excited for Jay Rod to be here. He has competed here before. He was out for a little bit and now we finally got him back here,” Gadelha said.
“He’s everything we look for as well. His pace, his technique, the way he deals with media, the mic, he’s a really good athlete that we want here. And we called him after his match with Vagner [Rocha] and he was ready for a call and he’s here now.”
That withdrawal now leaves ADCC searching for a replacement in the 194 lbs (88kg) bracket, a scramble that will likely dominate grappling headlines in the run up to the event.
Gadelha also used the presser to explain the thinking behind the Bowl format itself, framing it as a training philosophy rather than a marketing gimmick.
“It’s a different performance inside the bowl,” Gadelha said. “This is the closest you can get to a fig ht without the strikes. And when you go compete, jiu-jitsu is mostly about advantages, points, and we want to see more action. We want to see athletes looking to finish matches.”
“I’ve done this my whole life. Athletes will always always always perform the way they train. And we need to have jiu-jitsu athletes training and practicing in competition the way we want them to perform inside the Bowl.”
The enthusiasm around Jay Rodriguez’s arrival, though, sits alongside a messier backstory that has followed him for the better part of a year. His departure from B Team was never fully explained at the time beyond vague references to adult content found on his phone. But his former girlfriend later posted a lengthy account disputing that framing, saying the full story was being flattened into something far more palatable than what actually happened.
According to her statement, what she discovered went beyond saved pictures. She described organized folders tied to specific women at the gym, containing images used in ways that had nothing to do with simple collecting.
She said she carried that discovery privately for months before eventually telling Nick Rodriguez in December 2024, and that she left the gym quietly the next day without asking anyone to remove Jay Rodriguez from the team. She also detailed a pattern of controlling and physically intimidating behavior in their relationship, describing being blocked from leaving rooms and having her belongings knocked away from her.
By her account, it was only after Craig Jones reached out to her in March 2025, following up on rumors that had started circulating, that B Team leadership spoke with the women involved and ultimately removed Jay Rodriguez from the team. She has maintained that she never sought public attention for any of it and only spoke up later because other women connected to the gym were being blamed and harassed over the situation.
That removal, however, did not hold. Within roughly six months, Jay Rodriguez was back with the team, which by then had rebranded as Simple Man Martial Arts under different leadership, with Jones and Seth Belisle no longer part of running it.
The story resurfaced recently when Rayna Jophia, a former member of the gym, posted a reaction to the UFC BJJ signing news. Without laying out specifics, she pointed to the overlapping timeline between Jay Rodriguez’s exit from the team and the alleged end of Nick Rodriguez’s marrriage at the time, suggesting there was more connecting those two events than had been publicly acknowledged. Her comments read as pointed rather than celebratory, arriving just as both Rodriguez brothers find themselves under UFC BJJ contracts together.
