Islam Makhachev on Why BJJ Is the Great Equalizer in MMA

Islam Makhachev thinks Jiu Jitsu is the great equalizer in MMA, and his reasoning is simple: the best fighter isn't the best striker or the best wrestler, it's whoever is dangerous enough everywhere that they get to choose where the fight happens — and then chooses the one place their opponent can't survive. For Makhachev, that place is almost always the ground, which is exactly why he keeps telling anyone who'll listen that BJJ isn't optional for a serious fighter. It's the whole plan.

Speaking with Demetrious Johnson on his podcast, Makhachev laid out his logic for skipping the drama of a standup war against a dangerous striker. Why trade shots with someone whose one advantage is their hands, when you can just remove the hands from the equation entirely? As BJJEE reports, his phrasing was blunt: take the guy down, "take the money, go home."

The logic isn't new — it's the oldest lesson in the sport

This is, in essence, the founding argument of mixed martial arts, restated by its current pound-for-pound king. Three decades ago, a smaller Royce Gracie stepped into a cage full of strikers and boxers and wrestlers and proved that a fight doesn't have to be won on the feet if you're the one who decides where it takes place. Every dominant era of MMA since has been some variation on that same discovery. Fighters load up on strength and conditioning and striking flash, and then someone with a real Brazilian Jiu Jitsu base reminds them that a fight has a floor, and the floor changes everything.

Makhachev grew up wrestling in Dagestan, in the same lineage of sombo and freestyle wrestling that's produced a run of the most dominant grapplers in UFC history. But it's telling that when he explains his own gameplan, he doesn't talk about takedowns as the finish — he talks about them as the door. Get the fight to the mat, and from there it's a Jiu Jitsu problem: passing, control, and finding the choke or the joint lock that a pure striker has never had to defend in earnest. His finish over Dustin Poirier is the clean example. Rather than force something early, he described hunting patiently for a D'Arce choke, working the wrist and the angle until the finish was actually there. Watch the exchange on YouTube and you can see the patience in real time — no panic, no forcing it, just a grappler waiting for the position to open up.

Why this matters beyond the cage

It's easy to hear "take the money, go home" and file it as fight-camp trash talk. But it's really a statement about what BJJ is for. Jiu Jitsu was never meant to be a style you deploy when everything else fails — it's supposed to be the foundation that makes every other option safer to use. Makhachev doesn't grapple because his hands are bad. His striking is sharp enough to hang with plenty of the roster. He grapples first because Jiu Jitsu gives him a version of a fight where his skill compounds instead of trading evenly, round for round, punch for punch.

That's the part worth sitting with if you're not a UFC champion and never will be. Most people who walk into a BJJ gym aren't there to fight anybody. But the same principle applies at every level of the sport: don't measure yourself against training partners in the area where they're already strongest. If your partner is a physical mismatch on top, don't try to out-muscle them from bottom — control the distance, threaten the legs, force them to answer a question they haven't drilled as much as their pass. Makhachev's entire philosophy, stripped of the fight-camp packaging, is just good Jiu Jitsu strategy: find the version of the exchange where technique beats attributes, and steer there on purpose instead of hoping you stumble into it.

He put it even more directly when talking about what it takes to actually be a complete fighter, not just a good one in a single phase: "You cannot want to be champion with good arms. You have to do everything." That's a striking-specific line, but it reads just as true on the mat. The white belts who plateau are almost always the ones who found one escape or one sweep that works against their usual partners and stopped there. The ones who keep improving are the ones who go looking for the gaps — the position they're worst at, the transition they always give up — and drill it until it isn't a weakness anymore.

Champions like Makhachev didn't get complete by accident. They got complete because they treated every hole in their game as an assignment, not an excuse. That's a lesson that translates from the UFC's biggest stage down to a Tuesday night no-gi class, and it's as true now as it was when Royce Gracie first proved it.

See you on the mats.

Original report via BJJEE.