The 2022 season of Tezos WNO featured 40 matches of up and coming grapplers and established world champions. Out of 40 matches, 20 resulted in submissions, including a couple firsts in Tezos WNO history: a Z-lock by Jozef Chen and a camel crusher by “The Sultan of Strangles,” Mike Rakshan.

Some of the most talented female grapplers in the world took the mats at the 2022 IBJJF No-Gi World Championships last week. The top brown and black belts came to put on a show; they finished 54-percent of 106 matches by submission. In 13 of 18 divisions, more than half of all matches ended in submission.

Records broken, title shots earned, and debuts splendidly made; Tezos WNO: Gordon Ryan vs Jacob Couch was full of exciting matches and powerful statements from some of the world’s best grapplers.

Leglocks, like all submissions, are an important component of Tezos WNO. They have counted for a large portion of the match ending moves on the WNO mats, and many athletes have relied heavily — or repeatedly fallen victim to — lower body submissions.

The most recent year of WNO produced some of the most exciting jiu-jitsu matches in history. Champions were crowned, stars were made, rivalries were born, and submissions were made popular on the WNO mats. With the 2021 season complete, and the first event of the 2022 season just a few weeks away, now is our chance to look back on the past season and identify which teams, athletes, divisions and techniques stood out most.

All year, the 2021 jiu-jitsu season has shown signs that it could bring the changing of the guard, the rise of the next generation. Throughout the year, we’ve seen legacy champions fall to the young up-and-comers; we’ve seen new styles and strategies overthrow the more traditional ones.

The seventh installment of Who's Number One is in the books. Many of the competitors involved hit landmark victories which will certainly shake up the rankings. Several of the athletes also made, or altered, history.

By consensus, the co-main event at Who’s Number One: Gordon Ryan vs Vagner Rocha is going to be a wrestling showdown between two of the best takedown artists in the heavyweight division.

Vagner Rocha has a reputation.

Nicky Ryan and Roberto Jimenez have often been called prodigies in their budding careers as professional athletes. But their individual ascents to the top of the rankings have been substantially different. 

Atos and the Danaher Death Squad have been jousting for supremacy atop the no-gi scene for several years now. So it seems fitting to open 2021 with another installment of this intense rivalry in the main event at Who’s Number One.

In 2020, FloGrappling launched Who’s Number One, a series of superfights featuring the many of the best grapplers in the world. With the inaugural year of WNO now in the books, here are some of the athletes, trends, and noteworthy statistics from the mega event series in 2020.

Whether or not you believe in “American Jiu-Jitsu” exists separate from “Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu,” several individual Americans have made their marks on the world of submission grappling. If in no other way, Americans have at least impacted the history books.

Who’s Number One: Duarte vs Vieira was bound to be an action packed event, and it delivered at every turn. Kaynan Duarte’s submission victory over Rodolfo Vieria may have propelled him toward the next level of the sport. He, and several other competitors on the card, achieved noteworthy milestones. Check out those, and other interesting statistics from Who’s Number One.

If the 2020 IBJJF Pan No-Gi Championships is any indication, chokes are the most highly-favored submission type among grapplers in the IBJJF no-gi format. But that could soon change.