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It's not close minded to be based in reality.
Atos is probably one of the most innovative teams in BJJ. I mean they have been at the vanguard of a whole new BJJ paradigm for the past five years or so.
Those guys have a system that works, and they mostly stick to it until something better comes along. You don't see much rubber guard out of them. They discourage it as far as I can tell.
Why is that? Is it that they are close minded? Or is it that they just realize that it's not the best option?
Here is the difference: if you look at the stuff Atos mainly teaches, you will see it used repeatedly, with success, at the highest levels of BJJ. When was the last time you saw rubber guard used there?
There is a difference between being open minded and just fantasizing. The rubber guard revolution was supposed to happen a decade ago. It didn't.
For all the talk of "let the mat sort it out", I'm pretty sure the mat already did years ago. Yet some guys still cling to it for reasons I do not fully understand.
Eddie Bravo does a lot more self promotion than Rafa Mendes. Joe Rogan is a big proponent of it, and he's very much in the public eye, especially among MMA fans who grapple. The 2nd Royler match probably gave 10th Planet at least another 5 years of pseudo-respectability too.
Here's the thing: Eddie Bravo is not a bad grappler. His students are not bad grapplers. They're just not the best grapplers by any means, and their idiosyncratic system seems to fail against the best guys on the scene. But they market the shit out of it, and it works really well against lower ranked people who haven't seen it before because it is tricky to deal with a lot of 10th Planet's stuff. Then guys end up getting stuck with using it because they never develop a good basic game that will work against anyone, and once they're at purple or brown belt they don't want to give it up and get tapped out as they try to learn how to play basic stuff that they should have been working on for years at that point.
This happens outside of BJJ too, for what it's worth. I saw guys in Judo who would get really good at one or two unusual throws and that would allow them to throw a lot of green and brown belts in the dojo, but once they got to black belt ranks their lack of proficiency in the main throws like seio nage, uchi mata, osoto gari, and ouchi gari let them down and they couldn't get their tricky stuff to work against experienced competitors. It can lead to a real stagnation in development. I myself fell into that category for a long time and it was a real slog to climb out of it (and I'm still not as good as I think I would have been if I'd just worked on the basic throws from the beginning).