Art of Jiu Jitsu was the best team at Nogi Worlds, even with "average" purple belts, and here's why

A data-driven deep dive at the top 10 team performances at IBJJF Nogi Worlds

I took a look at every one of over 3400 matches from 2024 IBJJF Nogi Worlds to see if we could find the winningest teams. Art of Jiu Jitsu (AOJ) led the race by almost 10 percent, winning 64 percent of their 115 matches. There were certainly bigger teams — Alliance, Atos, Checkmat, Carlson Gracie, and Gracie Barra all had more than twice the number of matches last weekend, but AOJ kept its success rate higher.

Includes only teams with 100 or more matches

In fact, of the “big teams,” AOJ had the fewest matches total, at almost every level blue through black. Some other interesting notes about the distribution of rank across teams — Pedigo Submission Fighting has by far the most blue belts, perhaps to fill out their thinner brown and black belt ranks in a few years, given their relative “newness” to the IBJJF competition scene. AOJ has a disproportionally large crop of brown belts on the way to black belt soon.

A little closer look at the top 10 teams shows how some of them might have a “weak link” or group that really outperforms the rest. For example, AOJ blue, brown and black belts outperform pretty much all other teams, but their purple belts are on average, well, average. Carlson Gracie brown belts struggle to live up to the other ranks’ successes, with a little more than 30 percent of their matches won. PSF brown and black belts may still be growing into their ranks on the whole. Ares BJJ blue belts struggled to win last weekend, with the lowest win rate of all at 24 percent.

As perhaps expected, AOJ brought the largest juvenile team, in both numbers and percent. For whatever reason, CheckMat and PSF didn’t have a significant number of juvenile matches at all. Almost 75 percent of Carlson Gracie athletes were masters, while both Atos and AOJ brought more than 60 percent adult competitors.

It should be no surprise that Atos and AOJ adult competitors also outperformed every other team in terms of percentage of wins. Carlson Gracie brought not only a high percentage of master competitors, but also quality — they beat out other team’s masters athletes by a hair.

It is kind of interesting to note that at the schools known for “modern” competition in the grappling media, Atos, AOJ and PSF adults do 10 to 20 percent better than their master counterparts as a whole. Again its impossible to ignore the large margin between AOJ juvenile success versus all of the other teams.

Now just a little fun. When we put the top 10 teams head-to-head, who comes out on top? At this year’s Nogi Worlds, Alliance struggled against AOJ, winning only 14 percent of matches, but dominated Ares BJJ, winning 86 percent.

Pedigo Submission Fighting had the third highest overall winning rate amongst big teams, but seemed to struggle more against bigger teams, never breaking past winning more than half of their matches against the top 10.

Does not include head-to-head percentages when there are 4 or less matches, because, for example, winning just one match and having a “100% success rate” seems kind of silly

The absolute number of head-to-head matches is provided below. I think it would be interesting to add aggregate some more big tournaments in the future and see if the win rates would be more or less extreme.

It’s worth noting that there are some “mid-level” teams that did quite well. When we take a look at teams who had athletes participating in 50 to 100 matches, Team Lloyd Irvin and Unity Jiu-Jitsu matched AOJ’s success rate, a little over 60 percent.

About the Data

All data was collected from bjjcompsystem.com by Will Weisser. Matches from all age groups were included (Juvenile, Adult, and Masters). Matches won by no show, overweight or withdraw were not included.

Matches per team were counted only for the “main” affiliation listed. For example, “Atos Jiu-Jitsu” matches did not include those that had an athlete registered under “Atos JJ International” or “Atos JJ USA.”