Counting was the whole novelty.

BJJEE published a piece this week titled "The Dirty Scorecard: Which BJJ Teams Have The Most PED Violations?" and somewhere between the headline and the math, the sport finally got a leaderboard nobody volunteered for.

Fight Sports leads at five. Roberto "Cyborg" Abreu, André Porfirio, Roosevelt De Sousa, Vagner Rocha, Mica Galvão. The team built around the Cyborg/Galvão axis now leads a category nobody put on the trophy wall. Cyborg's case is the clean archetype: he won No-Gi Worlds at 42 in late 2022, then tested positive for exogenous testosterone in an out-of-competition sample three weeks later, then told the press he had no remorse because winning Worlds at 42 was incredible. Three-year ban accepted, vibes intact.

The Galvão suspension is the most recent of the five. USADA handed Mica a one-year ban in 2023 for a positive clomiphene test at the 2022 Worlds, and his father went on the record telling Graciemag the prescription was for low testosterone, which is a sentence somebody really said in public, on the record, about a teenager. De Sousa's case is even fresher — a three-year USADA ban for meldonium at the 2025 Worlds, posted in April 2026. Meldonium is the substance Maria Sharapova got famous for and that grappling has now caught up to.

Alliance is at four. Leonardo Nogueira, Tayane Porfirio, Fellipe Andrew, Gabi Garcia. The team's ledger spans clomiphene, a four-year ban for an anabolic steroid metabolite, and the Garcia case where the substance was found and the suspension was waived but the result was tossed. Reading the paragraph end to end, you start to notice the same drug names cycling through the roster.

Gracie Barra is at three, and three is misleading because two of them are Felipe Pena. Pena tested positive for testosterone in 2014 (one-year ban, USADA accepted the cream came from a healthcare provider), then tested positive again at the 2021 Worlds for clomiphene and got stripped of the title. Braulio Estima fills out the count. Statistically speaking, Gracie Barra has one Felipe Pena problem and one Estima problem. The leaderboard does not care about your shape; it cares about your total.

Atos is at two — Kaynan Duarte for ostarine, Jonnatas Gracie. Cicero Costha/PSLPB also at two: Paulo Miyao and Francisco Lo. GF Team, Dream Art, and Six Blades each have one. The math gets thinner the further down you go, which is mostly an argument that the bigger teams are bigger in this column too.

The article includes the caveat any honest counter has to print. Testing is not evenly distributed. Athletes competing at the highest IBJJF events get tested far more often than everyone else. If most of the tests happen at Worlds and Pans, then most of the positives come from the people who show up to Worlds and Pans. Fight Sports, Alliance, Gracie Barra, and Atos are the teams most likely to be on those podiums in the first place. The scorecard is not measuring how dirty a team is. It is measuring how often a team's athletes are in the room when somebody is collecting urine.

That caveat would matter more if anyone were arguing this is a moral ranking. Nobody is. The point is that the number now exists. For a sport that spent twenty years treating PED accountability as a personal embarrassment to be acknowledged once and never spoken of again, having a counted-up list pinned to a public webpage is a small structural change. Once a number exists, people argue about it. Once people argue about it, federations have to answer for it. Once federations have to answer for it, somebody at IBJJF has to read the article to a lawyer.

Which brings us to the timing. Two days before BJJEE published the scorecard, the Tackett brothers went on a UFC BJJ promo and confirmed the promotion will roll out formal PED testing by the end of 2026. William's framing: "UFC is going to start incorporating drug testing into the sport of Jiu-Jitsu." Andrew's framing: "I like testing. I think it's cool. It keeps everyone honest."

That is, on its face, a good development. It is also a good development being delivered by Andrew Tackett, current UFC BJJ welterweight champion, three weeks after he appeared to bite Vagner Rocha in the UFC BJJ 7 main event and posted "That's what you get for the oil check, Vagner" before walking it back. The integrity messengers are also the integrity story. That is a very BJJ way to launch a clean-sport program.

Here is what the scorecard does and does not change. It does not retroactively make anyone clean or dirty who was already known to be either. The Cyborg page on the internet has been the Cyborg page on the internet for years. What it changes is the verb. Before the scorecard, the sport could say "we have had some isolated incidents." After the scorecard, the sport has to say "we have an unbroken pattern across our four largest teams, concentrated in the same two or three substances, spread across roughly a decade." Those are different sentences. Those sentences imply different responses.

The other thing the scorecard changes is the comparison set. ADCC still does not test. CJI famously will not test. UFC BJJ is the only top-tier grappling organization currently committing to a testing program with a public deadline attached. That puts the rest of the sport in the position of having to explain why the youngest, most circus-adjacent grappling promotion is the one handling this seriously. Probably they will find a way.

For now: the standings are Fight Sports five, Alliance four, Gracie Barra three, Atos two. The sport finally has a number. The number is going to grow once UFC BJJ's program starts pulling samples. The teams at the top of the table are the same teams at the top of the actual table. Someone is going to call this unfair. Someone else is going to point out that "unfair" requires a baseline, and the sport has, at long last, a baseline.

Counting was the whole novelty.

This post was generated by AI. Sources are linked below. Follow @bjj-problems on YouTube for the weekly video digest.

Sources

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PED anti-doping USADA IBJJF Fight Sports Alliance Gracie Barra Atos UFC BJJ Tackett