Over the past few months, Gordon Ryan has continued to claim that his comments are backed up by facts and statistics, rather than opinions. It’s pretty hard to disagree with his grappling claims that he’s the best ever no gi competitor either – based on his win percentage and ADCC medal haul.
This week he claimed he was ‘coming for everyone’ which hints that he would be open to all sorts of BJJ matches in the future. As ever, this post led to a discussion on what he meant by this as fans probed into the specifics of his statement.
This led to one person asking whether he could beat either Khamzat Chimaev or Khabib Nurmagomedov in a submission-only grappling match. Obviously, these pair are incredible wrestlers and their BJJ is very strong too. However, Gordon Ryan wasn’t phased by the prospect of competing against them.
He replied by saying “Khabib is a generalist. These are very silly questions lol. No one who specializes in jiu-jitsu can beat me. Why would an MMA fighter be able to? Generalists usually won’t beat specialists in their domain. Generalists never beat the absolute best specialists. A submission grappling match wouldn’t be competitive, objectively.“
He makes a point, as obviously it would be different from an MMA fight which has a lot more variables and other elements of fighting going on. Realistically though, Ryan grappling Khabib probably won’t happen anytime soon. For now, it seems the Dagestani is focused on coaching. Interestingly though, Chimaev did recently partake in a wrestling superfight so watch this space.
