I've been defending Danaher ITT but yeah that's the worst osoto gari I've ever seen. Travis Stevens posted a much better O soto video earlier this year:
This is probably the simplest, most digestible breakdown of o soto I've ever seen, addressing directional kuzushi with his belt quadrants.
I still think Danaher has a lot to offer in terms of strategy and analysis (and I agree with most of the points he makes in the vid outside of his technique demonstrations) but like
@Chandler sama says above, it's baffling that Danaher would do this DVD without Travis Stevens on deck.
Short answer would be that Danaher wants to sell Danaher, the brand, which means headlining his material himself.
Changing the topic somewhat, i think there's one aspect of this discussion that often somewhat flies under the radar. That is, when looking at championship level competition in the ibjjf, you see for instance that some of the most common reversals by far are technical stand ups, such as with ankle picks, tree tops, or lapel feed signals.
Which is to say, even if you follow the idea that, given the structure of the scoring criteria, pulling guard first and putting yourself in the bottom position is a competitively optimal strategy - which i think is largely correct - in so far that you don't really need to focus on capability in neutral as such, it is still a fact that, even when starting from houses in different parts of the 'neighborhood', you so often can find you will end up driving through the same 'highways' on your way to the destination anyways.
Guard work in bjj is very well developed; defending passes, retaining guard, setting up grips, transitioning into your reversal - but it is at this last part where things can start getting... fuzzy. To generalize a broad trend of the field, relative to exponents of other traditions, i'd say 'finishing your food' is one of the weakest aspects dogging many bjj athlete's games, and you can see incidence of it even in high level guys, even in guys medaling at worlds. Like, almost all of them are very good at
getting to their position for a reversal, but for many to some degree (and some to a great degree), crossing that 'last hundred yards' can end up being a bridge too far.
What you too often see is a lot of what i sometimes call 'dead fish posture'; their feet aren't alive, their knees are dragging across the ground, their kinetic chain isn't linked, they're flopping around like flubber, and so on. In the gi especially, you have situations where guys are pretty much relying on just pure grip strength to hang on, while trying to drag the other guy down like a sack of flour. Basically, the kinds of problems you might see a lot of jiu-jiteiros have in their neutral game, overlaps a great deal, are essentially the same problems they might have in finishing their reversals; and by that same token on the other side of the coin, ability of competitors to defend takedowns or reversals as well.
So in the end it's like a case where, even if the exact tactic is not of specifically great benefit to your sport, the
capacities you'd need to succeed at it, are capacities you'd need for better success at other tactics in your sport, in any case.
