How the Power Index works
The Let's Roll Power Index is a composite ranking of the strongest BJJ competition teams in the world, built from official, public competition data. No panel votes, no vibes — just the two biggest public ledgers in the sport combined into one number, with every assumption written down on this page.
Data sources
IBJJF season rankings (gi). The IBJJF publishes official academy season rankings — points earned by each affiliation across its events. This is the gi backbone of the index, current through the 2026 season.
ADCC open-tour rankings (no-gi). ADCC publishes rolling team and individual rankings from its open circuit. Unlike IBJJF, these are gym-level with messy club names, so we resolve every entry ("ATOS HQ", "10th Planet South Bay") to a canonical brand before aggregating — snapshot as of Jun 2, 2026.
Index last updated Jul 17, 2026.
The six pillars
Each team is scored 0–100 per pillar, normalized against the strongest team in that category (with square-root compression so the #1 team doesn't flatten everyone else), then blended by the weights below.
Gi Strength
25%The brand's total IBJJF academy season points, with every member academy's points rolled up to the parent brand. This is the cleanest gi signal that exists publicly — the IBJJF itself ranks affiliations. It rewards showing up and winning at IBJJF events all season, which also means teams that focus elsewhere (ADCC circuit, pro superfights) will under-index here.
No-Gi Strength
25%ADCC Open adult team points plus every individually-ranked ADCC athlete we can trace back to the brand. ADCC publishes gym-level rankings with messy club names ('ATOS HQ', '10th Planet South Bay'), so we resolve each one to a canonical brand before adding it up. It's the best public no-gi ledger available, but it only covers the ADCC circuit.
Champions
20%How many athletes the brand has in the top 3 of elite divisions, weighted by placement (a #1 counts more than a #3). A team with three world-class killers scores differently than a team with three hundred solid competitors — this pillar captures the killers.
Roster Depth
15%The count of distinctly-ranked competitors across gi and no-gi, after de-duplicating athletes who appear on multiple boards. This is the 'army size' signal — big federations like Gracie Barra dominate here almost by definition, which is exactly why depth is only one pillar out of six.
Efficiency
10%Total points divided by the square root of roster size — output per athlete instead of raw output. This is the Moneyball pillar, and it's what the Pound-for-pound tab ranks by: a 20-person super-team can beat a 500-gym federation here. The square root keeps one-athlete outliers from gaming it.
Momentum
5%Whether the brand is climbing or falling. We compare its current gi standing against the snapshot closest to 90 days ago — never against anything fresher than 14 days, because a same-week re-scrape is noise, not momentum. Until 14+ days of history exist, momentum shows as '—' and contributes a neutral score.
Season recency weighting
IBJJF results fade with age instead of vanishing overnight: the current season counts at full weight (1.0), last season at 0.6, and two seasons back at 0.3. Anything older is dropped. This keeps a team that dominated 18 months ago from reading as a nobody in January, while still making the ranking about right now. ADCC data is a single rolling board with no season history, so it always counts at full weight.
What the index does NOT capture
- WNO, CJI, AJP and other majors. These events don't publish comparable public season rankings, so their results aren't in the data. A team built around superfight stars will be underrated here.
- Gym-level quality. The index ranks brands — the whole competition team, worldwide. Brand ≠ your local gym: a #1 team can have an affiliate down the street that has never entered a tournament, and a great neighborhood academy can belong to no ranked brand at all.
- The hobbyist experience. Coaching quality, culture, safety, cleanliness, how white belts are treated — none of that is in competition data. Reviews, photos and visits answer those questions; a leaderboard doesn't.
How gym pages use this
When a gym on Let's Roll belongs to a ranked brand, its page shows the affiliation's standing — worded as exactly that. The IBJJF rank is presented as the team affiliation's ranking, reflecting the competition results of the wider team across all its academies, never as a claim about that location alone. ADCC figures shown on a gym page are that gym's own ranked competitors, and we only name a specific athlete when the gym-to-club match is high-confidence.
Update cadence
We re-scrape and rebuild after major IBJJF and ADCC events — in practice roughly monthly. Every rebuild stores a dated snapshot, which is what powers momentum, the Rising/Falling rails, and the small rank-trend sparklines on the leaderboard. The freshness line at the top of the Power Index always shows exactly how current the data is.
FAQ
Why isn't my gym ranked?
The Power Index ranks brands (competition teams), not individual gyms. If your gym's team doesn't appear, it usually means its competitors haven't scored on the current IBJJF academy rankings or ADCC boards under a name we can resolve to a brand — or the team competes mainly in circuits we don't ingest yet (NAGA, AJP, local opens). Absence from the index says nothing about the quality of coaching at your gym.
Does a high Power Index rank mean the local academy near me is elite?
Not by itself. The rank belongs to the wider team — its whole competition roster worldwide. A #1 brand can have hundreds of affiliate academies, and your local one may be a great hobbyist gym that never competes. Gym pages on Let's Roll label this explicitly as the team affiliation's standing, not the location's.
Why do the rankings change when nobody competed?
Two honest reasons: season recency weighting shifts as a new IBJJF season becomes the 'current' one (older results fade at 0.6 then 0.3 weight), and every pillar is normalized against the strongest team in that category — so when a rival gains points, everyone else's normalized score can drift slightly even if their own results didn't change.
Why aren't WNO, CJI or AJP results counted?
The index only uses sources with official, public, machine-readable season rankings — IBJJF and ADCC. One-off superfight cards and invitationals don't publish comparable season standings, so folding them in would mean inventing our own point values. We've built a small, capped mechanism to credit marquee results when it can be done honestly, but until then those events simply aren't in the data, and we'd rather say so than pretend.