Windows Signs the Ruotolo Twins | No-Gi Weekly Oct 12–13, 2026

Two of those stories are about money chasing grappling talent, and one is about a grappler walking away from the biggest check of his career. That tension — the sport’s growing commercial pull against the athletes who still turn it down — is the throughline connecting all three. A tech giant just bet real money on two 23-year-old submission grapplers as mainstream crossover stars. A world-renowned coach got a reputational gut-check from one of his own peers. And a five-time Olympic champion reminded everyone that not every athlete is for sale.

Windows Signs the Ruotolo Twins in One of BJJ’s Biggest Sponsorship Deals Ever

Windows announced its sponsorship of Kade and Tye Ruotolo on October 12 with an Instagram post and a follow-up documentary-style video leaning hard on the brothers’ personalities rather than their trophy case. The exact dollar figure hasn’t been disclosed, but industry estimates put it in the seven-figure range — a number that would make it the single largest brand deal a pure no-gi grappler has ever signed, full stop.

The Ruotolos didn’t get here by accident. Both built their names in BJJ before taking their games into ONE Championship’s submission grappling and MMA divisions, and both have the kind of camera-ready charisma that translates outside a room full of grappling nerds. Kade currently holds ONE’s lightweight submission grappling title. Tye has spent 2026 trading wins with the division’s biggest names, including a high-profile run against Christian Lee.

What makes this deal different from the usual gi or supplement sponsorship is who’s writing the check. Windows doesn’t need grappling’s audience — it’s one of the most recognized software brands on the planet, selling to everybody. Signing the Ruotolos isn’t about reaching existing BJJ fans; it’s about using two likable, telegenic athletes to put a human face on a brand that mostly talks to IT departments. That’s a different kind of validation than another rashguard company or supplement brand cutting a check, and it’s the real reason this deal is getting talked about as a milestone instead of just another signing.

Grappling has flirted with mainstream money before — energy drink logos on a gi patch, a watch brand sponsoring an ADCC broadcast — but those deals were always grappling companies or combat-sports-adjacent brands buying into a niche they already understood. A software giant with zero prior footprint in the sport choosing two specific athletes as the face of a campaign is a different signal entirely. It says the Ruotolos’ value isn’t just their finish rate; it’s that a brand manager with no grappling background watched tape of them and saw two guys who could carry a thirty-second ad the same way an extreme-sports athlete might.

It also raises the obvious question of what happens next. If Windows’ bet pays off in impressions and goodwill, other non-endemic brands will start taking calls from grappling management teams that would have gone straight to voicemail two years ago. That’s the actual upside here for the sport as a whole — not that two brothers got paid, but that a major non-endemic brand now has a public case study showing the audience is there.

For competitors watching from the regional circuit, the lesson isn’t subtle: brand deals are starting to follow the athletes who can actually carry a camera, not just the ones who can finish a leg lock. If you’re building your own name in this sport, the gear you compete in is part of that story — our breakdown of what sponsorship deals reveal about the best rashguards in 2026 digs into how athlete sponsorships are reshaping the gear market from the ground up.

Owen Livesey Says the Room Goes Silent When John Danaher Loses His Temper

British judo champion and grappling coach Owen Livesey spent two weeks training inside John Danaher’s New Wave room in Texas, and what he came away with wasn’t just technique. Speaking on the Life at the Apex podcast, Livesey described Danaher as physically frail off the mat — “he looks like he’s struggling to walk,” he said, pointing to Danaher’s well-documented hip and knee problems — but a different person entirely once instruction starts: “the smoothest technique I’ve ever seen.”

The temper is the part that stuck with him. Danaher works with the same demonstration partner every session and has close to zero tolerance for mistakes mid-technique. Livesey recalled one moment where Danaher swore at his partner over a minor positional error, delivered in his normal coaching tone — and Livesey was the only one who laughed. “The room’s completely flat,” he said, explaining that nobody else found it funny because nobody else was comfortable enough to react. Asked directly whether the room fears Danaher more than it fears Gordon Ryan, Livesey didn’t hesitate: “I think they fear him… he’s got a temper.”

None of this is a scandal — Danaher has never hidden that he runs a demanding room, and a Commonwealth Games judo champion laughing about it on a podcast is a far cry from an accusation. But it’s a rare outside look at the New Wave environment from someone who trained there briefly rather than lived there for years, and it lines up with why the room keeps producing finishers who move like they’ve drilled every detail a thousand times.

What makes Livesey’s account worth reading is that he’s not a New Wave regular looking to protect the brand, and he’s not a rival coach looking to take a shot at it either — he’s a visiting Commonwealth Games gold medalist with his own credibility, describing what he actually saw over two weeks. That’s a different kind of testimony than the usual training-partner hype reel or the usual anonymous forum gossip. A room that goes dead silent over one missed detail, from a coach who built his reputation on obsessive technical precision, is exactly the kind of culture you’d expect to produce a decade-long run of ADCC and submission-only champions — the discomfort and the results are coming from the same place.

If you’re curious what that attention to detail looks like applied to a single finish, our heel hook breakdown covers the kind of mechanical precision New Wave built its reputation on.

Teddy Riner Turns Down a UFC Payday: “It’s Not In My DNA”

Teddy Riner addressed the rumored multi-million dollar UFC offer directly in an interview tied to his new contract with PSG Judo, and his answer was about as clear as it gets: “It’s not actually that I refused — because it’s not in my DNA.” The French judo heavyweight, a five-time Olympic champion and eleven-time world champion, just re-signed with Paris Saint-Germain’s judo program through 2028, rejoining a club he’d already represented before.

At 37, Riner isn’t chasing relevance or a late-career payday — he’s arguably still the most dominant heavyweight his sport has ever produced, and he’s choosing to spend the next two seasons doing exactly what he’s always done rather than cash in on crossover interest the way so many other combat-sports names have. That context matters for why his answer landed differently than the standard “never say never” athlete non-answer. He wasn’t leaving the door open. He closed it, specifically, in judo terms.

Riner’s reasoning wasn’t about fear of competition or a bad contract on the table — he was blunt that money wasn’t the deciding factor. “No, I love what I do, I’m happy where I am, and it’s not money that’s going to make me change,” he said. He went further, framing judo not as a stepping stone to something bigger but as the thing itself: “I am in a sport that suits me… I can’t tell myself: ‘Well, I’m turning the page, I’m changing sports, and, oh well, so much for judo.'”

The most interesting line came when he was asked, hypothetically, how he’d fight himself in MMA. Riner didn’t play along with the premise — he leaned into it with a dig at the sport’s rule-light reputation: “I’d beat him up. I’d play anti-judo. Meaning I’d only do underhanded moves… You shouldn’t aim for judo, you should only aim for dirty tricks.” It reads as a joke, but it’s also Riner drawing a clean line between the discipline he’s spent two decades mastering and a sport he has no interest in testing himself against, no matter what it pays.

Riner’s decision is worth sitting with in the same week Windows signed the Ruotolos. One of grappling’s most decorated athletes just turned down a bigger payday than almost anyone in the sport will ever see, for reasons that had nothing to do with money. That’s not a knock on the brothers taking the Windows deal — there’s nothing wrong with getting paid for being good and likable at the same time. It’s just a reminder that loyalty to a sport and loyalty to a paycheck aren’t always the same decision, and the biggest names in grappling don’t always make the one you’d expect.

Looking Ahead

The calendar doesn’t slow down this weekend. Fight to Win 328 opens the action on October 16 in New England, Massachusetts, continuing the submission-only format that’s become one of the more financially stable products in professional grappling. The next day brings a three-way split: the ADCC USA New Jersey Open runs October 17 at Adventure Crossing USA in Jackson Township, giving East Coast competitors of every level a no-qualifier shot under ADCC rules, while on the same day the ADCC Latinoamérica Open streams live from Callao, Peru, pulling in South America’s regional talent pool under the identical ruleset.

Both ADCC Opens require no qualification, which keeps them functioning as the sport’s real on-ramp — kids divisions through masters, white belt through black, all scored under the same positional ruleset used at the World Championship itself. For a sport that gatekeeps its highest-visibility format behind brutal regional trials, that no-qualifier structure is quietly doing more to grow the no-gi pipeline than any sponsorship announcement will. We’ll have results from all three events, plus whatever comes next out of New Wave, in next week’s roundup.

Sources

• Windows Signs Kade & Tye Ruotolo In What May Be One Of BJJ’s Biggest Sponsorship Deals Ever — BJJ Eastern Europe
• Owen Livesey Says The Training Room Is Afraid Of John Danaher: “He’s Got A Temper” — BJJ Eastern Europe
• Teddy Riner Explains Why He Turned Down UFC: “It’s Not In My DNA” — BJJ Eastern Europe
• John Danaher Profile — FloGrappling
• ADCC USA New Jersey Open 2026 — ADCC News