One hand behind the neck, elbow driving down and in — the collar tie is wrestling's oldest standing control, and the grip modern no-gi grappling rediscovered when submission-only rulesets made the stand-up fight matter again. This is the position, not the takedown it sets up.
Before Kaynan Duarte's opponents feel his double leg, they feel his hand. FloGrappling's breakdown of his 2023 heavyweight match against Nicholas Meregali described the pattern the same way most scouting reports on Duarte do: he opens by reading the opponent off a collar tie, using it to move them around the mat before he ever commits to the shot that actually scores. The tie is not the highlight. It is the sentence before the highlight — the part nobody replays, and the part that decides whether the replay-worthy takedown is available at all.
That pattern is not unique to Duarte, and it is not new. It is the oldest standing control in grappling, older than jiu-jitsu itself: one hand cupped behind an opponent's neck, elbow driving down and in, used to break posture, deny distance, and dictate whether the next three seconds belong to the person doing the gripping or the person being gripped. Wrestling built a hundred years of hand-fighting science around that one grip. For most of jiu-jitsu's history, the sport imported the grip without much of the science — the collar tie showed up in the first exchange of a no-gi match and then mostly disappeared into a shot or a guard pull, treated as a formality rather than a skill.
That has changed. As submission-only formats stripped away the guard-pull safety valve and made the stand-up exchange something a grappler has to win rather than skip, the instructional market went looking for wrestling's answer to the question of who controls the first ten seconds. It found the collar tie waiting, and by the early 2020s a run of Olympic-level wrestlers — Thomas Gilman, Dustin Schlatter, Kerry McCoy among them — had released entire instructionals built around nothing else. Not a takedown system with a tie attached to it. A tie system, sold on its own, because the sport had finally agreed the grip was worth studying by itself.
This is that grip.
The collar tie is not a step on the way to a takedown or a headlock — it is the standing exchange that decides whether either is available, fought for continuously, grip against grip, for as long as two grapplers remain on their feet.
The collar tie's exact etymology is not reliably documented anywhere this article could verify, and readers should treat "collar tie" as the accepted wrestling-room name rather than a traceable coinage. What is documented is where the grip lives: it is folkstyle, freestyle, and Greco-Roman wrestling vocabulary, taught in American high school and collegiate wrestling rooms — and in international freestyle — for generations before Brazilian jiu-jitsu existed as an organized sport. It sits alongside the underhook, the two-on-one (the "Russian tie"), and wrist control as one of the handful of standing ties every wrestler learns before anything else, because in a sport with no jacket to grab, the body and the head are the only real estate available.
Jiu-jitsu inherited the grip from two directions that only converged recently. The first was judo and gi grappling, where the equivalent contest — kumi-kata, "the way of gripping" — used the collar itself rather than the neck, and where cross-collar and lapel control did comparable work to what a wrestler's collar tie does bare-necked. The second, more direct path was wrestling crossing into no-gi and MMA. Wrestlers who moved into mixed martial arts in the 1990s and 2000s — the generation associated with Randy Couture's clinch-heavy "dirty boxing" and its imitators — brought the collar tie with them wholesale, and it became a fixture of MMA clinch work well before it was taught as a discrete subject inside jiu-jitsu academies. For most of that period, BJJ curricula treated it as something a wrestler already knew, not something a jiu-jitsu student needed a dedicated class for.
The codification that changed that status is recent and it is concrete. Between roughly 2018 and 2024, a wave of decorated freestyle and folkstyle wrestlers released instructionals through BJJ Fanatics and its sister label Fanatic Wrestling that treat the collar tie as a complete, buyable subject rather than a footnote inside a takedown course. Kerry McCoy — a two-time NCAA champion and multiple-time Olympian out of Penn State — released Wrestling Control Ties, an Olympic-level breakdown of collar ties, underhooks, and two-on-ones built explicitly around both attacking and defending each. Dustin Schlatter — the 2006 NCAA champion at 149 pounds and a three-time All-American at Minnesota — released the four-part Collar Tie Attacks and Fundamental Takedowns. Thomas Gilman — a three-time NCAA All-American at Iowa, a 2020 Olympic bronze medalist, and the 2021 World Champion at 57 kilograms — released the three-volume Relentless Collar Tie Offense, organized around collar-tie mechanics, opponent reactions, and the takedowns those reactions open. Dan Vallimont — a two-time Penn State All-American and 2016 Olympic Trials competitor whose Russian Tie Formula did the equivalent work for the two-on-one (see the companion article on the Russian tie) — released a parallel two-part Collar Tie Formula, split into offense and defense. Hayden Zillmer, a three-time Minnesota state high school champion and NCAA All-American at North Dakota State, released Collar Tie Combat, built around hand-fighting mechanics and chaining the tie into takedowns.
The jiu-jitsu side of the ledger caught up in parallel. Craig Jones, the B-Team co-founder and two-time ADCC silver medalist, has taught collar-tie material inside his broader stand-up instructionals, including a segment BJJ Fanatics has published separately as "Collar Tie Triangles." And by the middle of the 2020s, coaching itself had followed the grip: FloGrappling identified Dima Murovanni — who trained inside B-Team's room during a 2022 recovery from injury and went on to serve as B-Team's ADCC 2024 camp coach — as the author of Kill The Collar Tie: BJJ Trendsetters, an instructional aimed specifically at the jiu-jitsu grappler who has no wrestling background and needs one grip's worth of defense to survive a wrestler's stand-up game. That a major no-gi team's camp coach shipped a product about defending one specific tie is itself a marker of how far the position has traveled — from something a jiu-jitsu student picked up by accident, to a subject taught, sold, and drilled on its own.
Strip away everything the collar tie sets up and what remains is a short list of mechanical facts that define the grip itself — the same list wrestling coaches have taught for a century and the same one the recent instructional wave organizes around.
The grip is behind the neck, not on top of the head. A hand resting on top of the skull or clamped to the back of the head gives almost no control — the opponent can duck under it, turn his head inside it, or simply walk forward through it. The functional collar tie sits low, cupped behind the neck near the base of the skull or across the upper trapezius, with the palm and forearm doing the work of steering the head rather than the fingers doing the work of squeezing it. Fight Encyclopedia's breakdown of the position is blunt about this distinction: the most common beginner error is tying too high, "offering no posture or head control whatsoever."
The elbow drives down and in, not out. The tying arm's elbow is the load-bearing joint of the whole grip. Held tight to the attacker's own centerline and driven downward, it transmits weight into the opponent's neck and shoulder line and makes the tie heavy — hard to simply shrug off. An elbow that flares outward turns the same grip passive, giving the opponent room to square back up or slip beneath it. This is the detail Cary Kolat's wrestling-room teaching foregrounds and the one nearly every collar-tie instructional opens with: the hand decides where the grip is; the elbow decides whether it does anything once it is there.
The free hand is never idle. A collar tie thrown with the other arm hanging is half a position. The standard pairing is a collar tie on one side and a wrist, bicep, or second collar tie on the other — the double collar tie, which functions closer to a Thai plum than a single-handed control and lets the attacker snap the head in two directions at once. Short of the double, the free hand is expected to be doing something: fighting for an underhook, controlling the opponent's opposite wrist, or setting up the two-on-one described in the companion piece on the Russian tie. A grappler with one hand on the collar tie and the other hand doing nothing is, in practice, already losing the exchange.
The fight is for the inside tie, and it is continuous. Two grapplers squared up rarely settle into a single static collar tie and hold it. What actually happens — the exchange that gives the position its texture — is a running contest for the inside lane: whoever's hand gets inside the opponent's arm, closer to the centerline, wins the local battle for that grip and forces the other hand to fight from the outside. This is the collar-tie-versus-collar-tie exchange: both grapplers tying, both circling, both pummeling for the inside position, neither committing to an attack until the hand fight resolves. It looks, from outside the sport, almost like nothing is happening. Inside it, an entire match is being decided. Grip fighting as a broader subject exists largely because this specific contest — the collar tie against the collar tie — repeats itself at the start of essentially every no-gi standing exchange in the sport.
What it produces. A collar tie held with the elbow down and the inside position won opens three families of follow-up, and understanding which one is live is largely a matter of reading the opponent's response to the grip. If the opponent's posture breaks forward and down, the tie converts into a snap-down — a sharp pull that drives the opponent's head toward the mat and either scores a position change outright or opens a front headlock, the deeper control position covered in the companion piece on Danaher's front headlock system. If the opponent resists the snap by driving forward into the tie, the same downward pressure sets up a level change — the tie occupies the opponent's upper body and vision while the attacker's hips drop underneath for a single or double leg. And if the opponent turns away from the tie entirely, refusing to engage it, the position becomes a route to the back, following the head as it turns and riding the resulting turn-in toward a body lock or a hook. None of these are separate techniques bolted onto a collar tie. They are the same grip, resolved three different ways depending on what the opponent's body does under it — which is exactly the design pattern Danaher's front headlock system formalizes one position downstream.
The collar tie's rise in the instructional catalog is downstream of a rules story, not a technical one. IBJJF-style points scoring rewarded a guard pull, which let generations of jiu-jitsu competitors treat the stand-up phase of a match as something to survive for four or five seconds before sitting down into a game they had actually trained. Submission-only formats — EBI, WNO, and especially ADCC's modern era, which now runs long enough rounds and heavy enough back-take incentives that a competitor genuinely cannot afford to spend the whole match on the bottom — removed that option. If a grappler cannot simply give up the stand-up fight, the stand-up fight has to be trained, and the wrestling world had already spent a century working out how to train it.
That is the door the wrestlers walked through. B-Team, built by Craig Jones and Nicky Rodriguez around a roster with heavy folkstyle and freestyle backgrounds, made hand-fighting and stand-up dominance a visible part of its competitive identity rather than a private advantage. The Danaher-coached lineage running through Gordon Ryan's front headlock game treats the collar tie as one of several legitimate doors into the same room, alongside the reactive stuffed-shot entry and the turtle. And the instructional market, as it does whenever a skill gap opens, filled it fast: by the mid-2020s a jiu-jitsu competitor with no wrestling background could buy a collar-tie-specific curriculum from a two-time NCAA champion, an Olympic medalist, or a coach whose entire pitch is "kill the collar tie" from the defensive side of the same grip.
The other visible shift is who the position now belongs to. A decade ago, the athletes controlling stand-up exchanges with collar ties and underhooks were almost exclusively the wrestlers-turned-grapplers — Nicky Rodriguez's early ADCC run as a Division III wrestler with no jiu-jitsu ground game is the clearest example, a silver medal earned largely on stand-up control before the ground game caught up. By 2026, the grip has diffused past that population. Heavyweight competitors built primarily as jiu-jitsu players, Kaynan Duarte foremost among them, now open matches the same way a wrestler would — tie up, read the reaction, then attack — because the instructional and coaching infrastructure that used to be wrestling-only is now available to anyone willing to buy it and drill it.
White belt does not fight the tie at all — he either lets it sit there unanswered or swats at it with an open hand, both of which lose the exchange before it starts. The first lesson is realizing the grip is live: something is being decided while his hands are doing nothing.
Blue belt learns to establish a collar tie with the elbow down rather than the hand alone, and to pair it with a second grip instead of leaving the free hand idle. Blue belt also learns the position's most basic counter — circling off the tie's power angle rather than pulling straight back against it.
Purple belt learns to read the tie instead of just holding it. The purple belt recognizes, from the opponent's posture under the grip, whether a snap-down, a level change, or a back-take is the live option, and commits to the one the opponent's body has already offered rather than guessing.
Brown belt wins the inside-tie fight as a matter of course and treats the collar-tie exchange as a place to make an opponent uncomfortable for the whole first minute of a match, independent of whether an immediate takedown is available. The brown belt understands that a won stand-up exchange is worth something even when it does not score.
Black belt integrates the collar tie into a complete stand-up system — tie, snap, level change, back exposure — and can move fluidly between all three without a visible seam, closing off whichever escape the opponent's reaction has just revealed.
1. Tying too high. A hand resting on top of the head instead of behind the neck controls almost nothing. The opponent ducks underneath it or turns his head free. The tie belongs low, near the base of the skull or across the trapezius.
2. Letting the elbow flare. An elbow held away from the body turns a heavy, controlling tie into a light, easily shrugged one. The elbow stays tucked and drives down, transmitting weight rather than just occupying space.
3. Leaving the free hand idle. A single collar tie with the other hand doing nothing is half a grip. Pair it with a second collar tie, a wrist grip, or a fight for the underhook — an idle hand is an invitation for the opponent's free hand to attack first.
4. Pulling straight back against pressure. The reflexive response to a heavy collar tie is to yank the head back and away. This burns energy without solving the problem and frequently exposes the neck further. The better answer, as wrestling coaching consistently teaches, is to circle off the tie's angle and fight for the inside position rather than muscle backward against it.
5. Treating the tie as a formality before the real technique. The most common jiu-jitsu-side error is rushing through the collar-tie exchange to get to a shot or a guard pull, without actually winning the grip fight first. A collar tie entered into and abandoned in the same motion gives the opponent a free read on the coming attack.
At open mat this week, isolate the tie itself and nothing downstream of it. Stand up with a same-rank partner and set one rule: the only objective is to establish and hold a collar tie with the elbow down and the inside position won, while your partner tries to do the same to you. No takedowns. No snap-downs. No guard pulls. Ninety-second rounds, reset, go again.
You will lose the inside-tie fight more often than you win it at first. That is expected — it is the same exchange a wrestling room drills for years before a shot is ever added to it.
Once the tie itself feels less foreign, add one response. Have your partner commit to one of three reactions on a signal — post forward into the tie, turn the head away, or try to duck under and level-change — and practice reading which one they chose and answering it: the snap-down for the forward post, the follow-to-the-back for the turn-away, the sprawl or re-tie for the level change. Repeat weekly for a month. The stand-up phase of a no-gi match will stop feeling like a formality you survive on the way to your real game.
The collar tie is a standing control, not a bottom or top ground position, so it has no parent in the guard-and-pin taxonomy — it sits upstream of several of them.
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