Emilio Carrero sent 4 questions to Felipe Costa asking about IBJJF Referees, brackets, fair treatment and Metamoris, here is the result:

First, do you feel that people who are affiliated with teams should be allowed to referee IBJJF tournaments? why or why not? If not, what should they do instead to fix this?

It would be great if it was not, but is not the reality of an amateur sport like ours. The most important thing to do in my my opinion is to train properly the referees and pay them decently. None of this happens today.

2. Also how do you feel about how the brackets are drawn up for the major tournaments? Should leaders of teams decide the bracket matchups?
The brackets for lower belts is made by computer and for black belts is decided by the team leaders to avoid the top guys to face each other in the first rounds. I believe is fair, if it was made by computer, imagine Roger Gracie and Buchecha facing each other in the first round, while Rodolfo Viera waits as STAND BY.
So to avoid possibilites like this, they put the leaders to choose. Unfurtunatly there are leaders who have more influence than others and take advantage of a situation that should be a democratic decision to favour their own teams.
A good solution for that would be a certain kind of ranking and I heard IBJJF is working on it already.

3. Have you ever felt you or your team were not given fair treatment in a match for some reason?

Yes, of course I did, not once but many times.

4. Rener Gracie was a commentator for the Metamoris tournament even though his brother was competing and his family help promotes it. Do you think this is a conflict of interest?

I think Rener is a great communicator and I think is no problem that he comments when his brother fight. The one's listening have to be smart to have their own opinion too and not just accept as the final truth whatever they hear on TV (or internet).

Since Im not a big fan of the stand up game, i wish the fight were more in the ground, but most of the time it was standing. In the end the score of 2x2 in advantages and one penalty against JT, as you can see in the video.

JT e Tanquinho both got a verbal penalty for going out of the fighting area, but then when Tanquinho pulled guard, JT didn't engage when Tanquinho was trying to... and that is where JT got the penalty that costed the fight!

For the people who were watching/listening on budovideos or who do not know the choke that Tanquinho did, it was not just putting the legs and squeezing the head. There is a lot of pressure on that choke, the fact that he didn't move is not a proof that he wasn't feeling any pressure, it may mean the exact oposite...how many times we are inside a triangle, without know where to go and we just stay still and try to be calm not to waste more oxygen?

For those who are not familiar with the rules (or that may think you know it all) you must understand that a person does not need to defend for the oponent to get an advantage! You get an advantage if the person is in a dangerous situation, how the videos and photos don't show how JT may have been  snorting, for example.

I understand some people make comments out of passion, just like in any other sports, but usually when you crucify a certain player you dont know him and he will probably not even get this info, but in the other hand  the BJJ community is still small and the practitioners are use to bump all the time to the "stars" of the black belt, plus the social networks make everyone pretty close. So we all can not just hide behind the screen of our computer and offend the fighters, like I see some people doing towards Tanquinho.

Also, unlike the comment of a GM reporter said, nobody, especially none of this 2 guys fight to win by "merely advantage". It just happen that they are so good and in similar level that they couldn't manage to win by more than that.

In the end some people will agree with me and some will not. The fact is that this is history now and Im sure they will face each other again as they already did in the past.

For this year, at the NO GI we have the champion with all credits he deserve! Tanquinho won! Nobody can take that from him and he can be proud of a great performance, also beating by 9 points the favorite Leandro Lo in the semi finals.

(When I see JT, Lo, Tanquinho and all those beasts of the light weight is one of the moments that Im very happy that I was born a "rooster")

The big lesson IBJJF have to take from this, in my opinion, is that they need to work to educate not only the judges, but also the crowd/competitors who very often don't know the rules well.
My contribution to the community is here, FREE APP explaining the rules. If I can do that, I believe IBJJF can do much better.

Felipe Costa

DOWNLOAD for FREE HERE: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/felipe-costa-bbb2-bjj-competition/id527833351?mt=8

Rodrigo Comprido & Felipe Costa went all the way to Mexico city to support BRASA team during the tournament.
Also Comprido fought and won the Open weight Black Belt category that was created for the first time ever.
Now he is part of Mexican history too!