ADCC Rookie Report: Jacob Couch

Jacob Couch: An American Jiujitsu Star

The first ADCC North American Trials have concluded and a darling of the Brazilian jiu-jitsu community has punched his ticket to the World Championships. Jacob Couch, The Hillbilly Hammer, is on his way.

Couch earned recognition as a key member of FloGrappling’s Daisy Fresh series. If you haven’t seen it, Flo followed a small Brazilian jiu-jitsu team, Daisy Fresh, around for years documenting the unlikely rise of their team. They went from living and training in an abandoned laundry mat to winning match at Flo’s WNO series and taking major IBJFF events.

The docuseries is a great metaphor for combat sports as a whole. Dirt poor children literally scratched and crawleed their way out of obscurity using regulated, socially acceptable violence as a means to an end. The series is batshit insane and I can’t do it justice here. Watch it on Youtube after you’re done reading this.

Couch grew up in a trailer in rural Kentucky. He’s using the sport of submission grappling to lift himself out of unimaginable poverty. Couch can fight gritty when he needs to, but Couch’s overwhelming offense gave all of his ADCC Trials opponents no opportunity to win a match.

Couch submitted everyone at ADCC trials and no one got around his guard, let alone scored a point on him. The most interesting thing about Jacob Couch’s run is he won the entire event playing bottom.

ADCC is primarily a wrestling event and many analysts have wrongly claimed you can’t win the tournament playing off your back. Not only did Couch do just that, but he submitted two of his division’s better wrestlers in minutes after not even fighting them for top position.

Today we’re going to look at three important pieces of Couch’s run and discuss how they tie together to form a cohesive modern Brazilian jiu-jitsu game.

Attacking High-Low And Low-High

There is a simple principle in submission grappling about attacking low to score high and vice-versa. If you attack someone’s posture and upper body submissions they will push off to make space, giving you room to attack their legs. The inverse is also true. If I attack your legs you’ll pressure forward so I can’t enter them as easily and then I can attack your posture and upper body submissions.

Low-high and high-low.

Couch spent a lot of time scooting towards his opponents to enter leg entanglements. To avoid entering an exchange on Couch’s terms, some opponents would drop to their knees so they could pressure pass. Couch took advantage of this by attacking butterfly sweeps and shoulder crunch attacks.

Later in the day, Couch would go back to the shoulder crunch.

The shoulder crunch is a simple and brutal way to punish people’s pressure, overhead posts, and cross faces. It causes such a major overreaction that it almost makes scoring an inevitability.

Jacob Couch’s Closed - K Guard

In Couch’s final two matches he opted to play closed guard and slow the solid wrestlers he faced. This slower pace allowed him to enter K Guard and attack leg entanglements from in tight.

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