Danaher on Why BJJ's Standup Game Is Still So Underdeveloped
Every BJJ match starts on the feet, and yet standup remains the part of Jiu Jitsu most of us are quietly worst at. John Danaher has now put his finger on exactly why — and his diagnosis, laid out…
Every BJJ match starts on the feet, and yet standup remains the part of Jiu Jitsu most of us are quietly worst at. John Danaher has now put his finger on exactly why — and his diagnosis, laid out this week and reported by BJJEE, should sting a little, because most of us will recognise our own academy in it. You can hear Danaher work through the whole argument on YouTube, and it breaks into three problems that stack on top of each other.
Standup as warm-up: the habit every BJJ school knows
The first problem is cultural, and it's the one you've probably lived. In most schools, the standing position is treated as a formality — class opens, you drill a couple of takedowns while everyone's still loosening up, and then the "serious" part of the lesson begins on the ground. Nobody announces that takedowns don't matter; the structure of the class just quietly says it every night. Compare that with how a wrestling room or a judo club spends its evening, and you can see why a blue belt with three years of mat time can run a beautiful open guard and still have no honest answer to the question "how do you get the fight to the floor?"
The fragment fallacy and the add-on fallacy
The second problem is a coaching one, and Danaher splits it into two traps. The first he calls the fragment fallacy: teaching takedowns as isolated party tricks — a single here, an uchi mata there — rather than as a connected system of grips, setups, and reactions. His line on it is blunt: "You can't learn Jiu-Jitsu in fragments. You have to learn the whole thing." Anyone who has learned chained guard passing or a leg-lock system knows he's right, because that's exactly how the ground game got so good. We systematised everything below the waist and left the feet as a pile of disconnected moves.
The second trap is the add-on fallacy — importing techniques wholesale from wrestling or judo without adjusting them for Jiu Jitsu's rules. Wrestling setups built for no-gi start breaking down the moment a gi gives your opponent handles to slow you down. Big-amplitude judo throws carry a subtler danger: in judo, a failed attempt is usually protected by a referee stoppage, but in BJJ a botched throw can leave you stuck under side control for the rest of the match. The techniques aren't bad — they're just being transplanted without the surgery.
No incentive, no takedowns
The third problem is the most stubborn because it's structural. The sport simply doesn't force anyone to fix this. Guard pulling is legal and often tactically smart, points can be built entirely from sweeps and passes, and the modern submission-only scene barely acknowledges the feet at all. Danaher puts it in one sentence: you can be a world champion in Jiu Jitsu without knowing a single takedown. As long as that's true, the average competitor's training time will flow to what the scoreboard rewards — and honestly, who can blame them?
What this means for your own Jiu Jitsu
None of this is an abstract elite-level debate. If you train Brazilian Jiu Jitsu for self-defence, the standing phase isn't optional — the street has no guard pull. If you compete, a credible takedown threat changes every exchange before it starts, because an opponent worried about being put down concedes grips and posture everywhere else. And if you're a coach, the fix Danaher is pointing at doesn't require turning your academy into a wrestling room. It requires treating standup the way we already treat the ground: as a system, taught in chains, adapted to our rules, and given real minutes on the clock rather than the five sleepy ones before drilling starts.
The encouraging part is that we've watched this movie before. Leg locks went from ignored to essential in under a decade once somebody systematised them — and Danaher was at the centre of that shift too. There's no reason the standing game can't follow the same arc, and the practitioners who start now will be years ahead when it does. Maybe the honest first step is small: next open mat, start one round on the feet. See you on the mats.
Original report via BJJEE.