Most passers own a handful of favorite passes. Gordon Ryan built something larger — a complete, catalogued answer to every guard a modern opponent can present, organized by guard type and run through one decision-tree formula. Codified across his "Systematically Attacking The Guard" instructional franchise, it is the reference architecture for elite no-gi passing.
The most telling thing about watching Gordon Ryan pass a guard is how little of it looks like passing. There is no explosive dive past the legs, no scramble won by a half-second of speed, no single move a spectator can name and replay. What there is, instead, is a man arriving in a stable, upright staging position over an opponent's legs and then — calmly, and apparently in no hurry — beginning to read. His opponent frames; Ryan answers. His opponent recovers a hook; Ryan answers that. Each answer removes one of the guard's options and adds none of its own, until the guard that started the exchange as a weapon has been reduced to a problem with one remaining exit, and Ryan is already standing in front of it.
To the crowd it reads as pressure, or size, or patience. To anyone who has studied the material, it reads as a table of contents. Because the game running in front of them is not improvised and it is not a collection of tricks. It is a catalogued system — a specific, ordered answer to each distinct kind of guard a modern grappler can present, all of them run through the same short decision-making formula. Ryan and his coach, John Danaher, did to guard passing what the camp had already done to leg locks and to the back: they defined the whole territory, mapped it position by position, and then wrote the map down.
That map has a name and a spine of instructionals behind it. Ryan called the project Systematically Attacking The Guard, and over several releases it grew from one passing course into the closest thing the sport has to a complete passing encyclopedia — organized not around Ryan's favorite passes but around the guards themselves, one solved chapter at a time. This is a story about how that whole architecture is built, and why "which pass" turned out to matter less than "which guard, and in what order."
Ryan's passing system is not a set of passes but a taxonomy of guards. Its claim is that every guard a modern opponent can play is a known, catalogued problem with a prescribed answer — and that a passer who has solved the guards in advance no longer improvises through them, but selects.
Gordon Ryan's passing did not begin as a passing project. It began as the top half of a game whose bottom half — leg locks and the back — made the camp famous first. Through the mid-2010s the Danaher-led squad out of the Renzo Gracie Academy in Manhattan built its name proving that heel hooks and leg entanglements were a legitimate primary offense. But a leg-lock game only fires from the top and from scrambles, and a grappler who could not reliably get on top of the world's best guard players would never get to use it. Passing was the unglamorous prerequisite, and Ryan set about solving it with the same method the camp applied to everything: define the problem exhaustively, then reduce it to a repeatable sequence.
The codified proof that this became a discrete system, rather than a set of preferences, is the instructional itself. Systematically Attacking The Guard was released through BJJ Fanatics around 2018–2019 as an eight-volume study — six volumes of technical instruction and two of narrated live rolling — running past ten hours. It was not a highlight reel of passes. It opened with the requirements of the passer and a decision-making formula, then moved through the guards one family at a time: closed guard and rubber guard, the knee shields and half-guard variants, the deep-half and lockdown positions, and then the leg-entanglement guards — reverse de la Riva, ashi-garami, X-guard, single-leg-X, 50/50 — that the leg-lock era had turned into the most dangerous bottom positions in no-gi.
What makes the project a franchise rather than a single course is what came after. Ryan expanded it into Systematically Attacking The Guard 2.0, which built out the toreando, high-step, and flanking passes; a later 3.0 centered on the "inside camp" position; and a set of dedicated guard-specific studies — from closed guard, from the seated open guard, from half guard, and the ten-volume Body Lock Study that carves the single body-lock pass out into a discipline of its own. Taken together they are the athlete-side codification of a complete passing curriculum, organized by the guard being attacked.
The relationship to his coach's work is worth stating cleanly, because the two are easy to conflate. Danaher's own passing framework — laid out in his Go Further Faster: Passing series — is the conceptual umbrella: the argument that passing is two problems in a fixed order, first neutralize the legs, then pin the upper body. Ryan's project is the competitor's build on top of that principle: the same underlying logic, expanded into an exhaustive, guard-by-guard commercial catalog, sharpened by what actually worked against the best guard players in the world, and taught with the camp's signature live-roll pedagogy. The philosophy is Danaher's; the encyclopedia is Ryan's.
A generic pressure-passing lesson teaches a pass — the knee-cut, the toreando — as a self-contained movement you perform. Ryan's system starts one level up, with a claim about organization: that the passer's real problem is not executing any single pass but knowing, before the exchange begins, which guard he is looking at and which answer that guard has already been assigned. Everything else is downstream of treating the guard as a finite menu of known positions rather than an open-ended scramble.
The physical anchor of the whole system is a stable launching platform. Ryan's is a low, athletic split-squat stance over the opponent's legs — one knee up, base wide, spine tall — from which he can advance, retreat, or change direction without committing his weight. It is Ryan's equivalent of the staging platform Danaher calls headquarters: not a pass, but the place from which passes are chosen. Holding a stable staging position is what converts passing from a gamble into a decision, because a passer who has not committed cannot be swept or entangled for a commitment he never made.
From that platform runs the decision-making core the instructional markets as a three-part formula — a compact "if they do this, then I do that" tree rather than a memorized sequence. The passer presents pressure; the guard player must respond; the response opens exactly one high-percentage answer, which the passer takes, arriving at a new staging position from which the same read runs again. The point of the formula is that the passer never has to guess. Each guard reaction has been mapped to a reply in advance, so the live decision is reduced to recognition. This is why Ryan can look unhurried against elite guards: he is not searching for a pass, he is identifying which branch he is already on.
The system's stylistic signature is what Ryan calls loose passing. Where an older pressure-passing model teaches the passer to jam chest-to-chest and grind, Ryan's default is to stay slightly mobile — connected to the opponent but not glued to them — so that he can flow from one pass attempt to the next without ever surrendering forward momentum. The pressure is constant but the contact is fluid; the aim is to keep the guard permanently one beat behind, reacting to the last threat while the next is already arriving. It is a deliberately different answer from the classic heavy, static top game, and the instructional draws that contrast explicitly.
The most consequential single idea in the franchise is a specific answer to the specific problem the camp's own leg-lock revolution created. Once reverse de la Riva and the ashi-garami family became high-percentage attacking guards, the old habit of stepping a knee across or driving a shoulder past the legs fed a leg straight into an entanglement and a heel-hook entry. Ryan's answer is the high step: rather than passing low, through the zone where the legs can hook and load, the passer lifts the trailing leg high and steps it over the entangling structure, clearing the danger from above and landing past it. The instructional's stated ambition for this method is blunt — to let the passer, in its own framing, avoid ashi-garami altogether. Against the exact guards that make modern no-gi lethal, the high step is the tool that refuses to play the guard's game, and it is the clearest thing the system offers that a generic passing lesson cannot, because the problem it solves only exists at the collision of elite passing and elite leg-locking.
The high step travels with two companions in the 2.0 material: the toreando family, which clears both legs to one side by controlling them at the knees or shins, and the flanking passes, which attack around the side of a guard whose front has been shut down. Together the three form the mobile, over-the-top wing of the game.
Sitting alongside that mobile wing is the system's clamp-and-crush wing: the body-lock pass, which wraps the hips, walks a seated guard flat, staples a leg, and forces the opponent to choose between being pinned or giving up the back. It is central enough to Ryan's competitive results that he gave it its own ten-volume study — but within the larger architecture it is precisely one branch of the tree, the answer prescribed for a particular family of upright, seated, entanglement-hunting guards, not the system itself. Readers who want the clamp's full anatomy — the front and side locks, the stuff/shelve/split leg options, the pin-or-back dilemma — will find it treated in depth in Gordon Ryan's Body Lock Passing System. Its place here is as a demonstration of the organizing logic: a whole discipline that resolves, in the map, to a single labeled route.
That is the load-bearing idea. The curriculum is filed by the guard being attacked — a chapter for the closed guard, a chapter for the knee shield, a chapter for half butterfly and deep half and the lockdown, a chapter for the seated open guards, a chapter for the leg-entanglement and supine positions — each pointing to the staging position, the read, and the pass or passes prescribed for it. A passer who has studied the map does not walk into an unfamiliar guard and improvise; he recognizes which of a finite set of known problems he is looking at, and runs the answer it was assigned. The passes are interchangeable tools inside that structure. The structure is the system.
By 2026 the vocabulary of Ryan's passing project has become the ambient language of elite no-gi. Walk into a serious competition room and the tells are everywhere: passers holding a stable staging stance rather than diving, staying loose and mobile instead of jamming, high-stepping over reverse-de-la-Riva and ashi-garami structures rather than passing into them, and treating each guard as a known problem with a rehearsed answer. Much of that field never trained a day under Ryan or Danaher. The method spread the way the camp's leg-lock game spread a decade earlier — through instructionals, through competition footage, and through the plain fact that grapplers who refused to learn it kept losing to those who had.
The instructional franchise itself is part of the mechanism. The Systematically Attacking releases helped normalize a particular way of packaging knowledge: long, connected, decision-tree instructionals sold as complete systems rather than technique grab-bags, taught with extended live-rolling volumes in which the athlete spars and then narrates what he was reading and why. The idea that a passer should study transitions and reads rather than collect individual passes — that "which guard, in what order" matters more than any one move — is now the default way ambitious no-gi competitors approach the top game.
The room that built it fractured even as the ideas propagated. The original Danaher-led squad split in July 2021; Ryan, Danaher, and Garry Tonon formed New Wave Jiu-Jitsu in Austin, later rebranded Kingsway Jiu-Jitsu, while several former teammates founded B-Team in the same city. The split scattered the personnel and left the framework intact — if anything accelerating its spread, because the material now travels through several competing gyms and catalogs rather than one closed room.
A common misreading deserves a gentle correction. The system is often dismissed as a big man's game — pressure that works only because Ryan outweighs and out-muscles his opponents. The record complicates that reading. Ryan's most-cited passing performances include a 2019 ADCC absolute run in which he beat larger, gi-decorated opponents at open weight, and a 2022 campaign at over-99 kg against men as big as or bigger than himself. The system's engine is organization and staging, not mass; weight helps, as it helps everywhere in grappling, but a catalog of solved guards does not scale away with the size of the person consulting it.
Selecting bouts where the passing game as a whole — the read, the staging, the top control — rather than a single highlight submission, was the deciding thread. Because passing decides matches through accumulated control rather than a discrete finishing moment, the per-exchange detail below is characterization of well-documented results; the frame-by-frame passing sequences are flagged for source-check. Matches that turn specifically on the body-lock clamp are treated in the body-lock article; the emphasis here is on the breadth of the passing game across different opponents and different guards.
The through-line is that a spectator can predict the shape of each of these matches before it starts — a stable staging position, a guard read, a pass selected rather than forced, top control banked — and the prediction keeps being right against opponents playing very different guards. That is the signature of a system rather than a highlight.
White belt takes one lesson from watching Ryan pass: arrive before you finish. Learn to hold a stable staging position over an opponent's legs and pass into a pin rather than around into open space, and hold the pin for the length of a round without being reguarded. The high step and the leg-entanglement chapters are not for the first year; the habit of establishing a platform before committing is available on day one.
Blue belt starts learning the reads. The insight that a guard reaction tells you which pass is open — rather than that you pick a pass and force it — is the shift from a blue belt who has favorite passes to one who has a decision tree. Drill the "if they frame here, I go there" branching from a single staging position.
Purple belt builds the guard-by-guard map. This is the rank to start treating each guard as its own problem with its own answer — the knee shield differently from the seated guard, the half guard differently from the supine guard — rather than trying to apply one pass everywhere. The purple-belt error is a one-size pass; the fix is a catalog.
Brown belt connects the branches and adds the leg-entanglement answers. This is where the high step and the body lock become live tools, and where "pass" and "pass safely against a leg-locker" stop being separate skills. The brown belt studies the transitions between staging positions, not the passes in isolation.
Black belt rebuilds the whole map from the guard player's side. He knows every entry the modern guard uses because he has studied the same instructionals everyone else has, and pre-empts the guard before it arms. For a black belt inside this system, passing is not a scramble entered hopefully; it is a table of contents consulted in real time.
1. Collecting passes instead of building a map. The most common error, and the one the whole system exists to correct. Learning the knee-cut, the toreando, and the body lock as separate party tricks misses the entire point, which is that they are answers filed against specific guards. Fix: study which guard each pass solves, and drill the recognition — "what am I looking at?" — before the pass.
2. Abandoning the staging position too early. Diving for a pass from an unstable base, before a read has resolved, is how good passers get swept and entangled. The staging position is not a pause; it is the platform the decision is made from. Fix: hold the stable stance until the opponent's reaction has told you which branch is open, then commit.
3. Passing low into a leg-entanglement guard. Against reverse de la Riva and ashi-garami, stepping a knee across or driving a shoulder through feeds a leg straight into a heel-hook entry. This is the exact failure the high step was built to prevent. Fix: pass over the entangling structure, not through it — lift the trailing leg high and clear the danger from above.
4. Grinding when you should be loose. Treating every pass as a chest-to-chest jam surrenders the mobility the system runs on and lets a good guard player frame and recover. Fix: stay connected but mobile; keep constant forward pressure without gluing your weight down, so the next pass is always available.
5. Studying the passes and skipping the live-roll volumes. The instructionals close with narrated sparring for a reason: the reads only make sense in motion. A practitioner who memorizes the technical chapters but never studies the decisions in a live roll has the vocabulary and not the grammar. Fix: study the transitions and the reasoning, not just the finished positions.
At open mat this week, isolate the staging position and the read — nothing else. Start on top in your partner's open guard. Your only goal for a five-minute round: establish a stable staging stance over the legs and hold it, answering each of your partner's framing and hooking attempts by repositioning rather than by passing. No pass allowed. You are training the platform and the recognition that everything else depends on, and that almost everyone skips in a hurry to reach the finish.
Add a second round in which one guard is fixed in advance — say, a knee shield, or a seated guard — and you drill only the branch prescribed for it: the staging position, the read, and the one or two passes that guard opens. Run the same guard until the answer is automatic, then switch to a different guard next session. You are building the map one chapter at a time, which is exactly how the material is organized.
Then, if your gym and rank permit leg entanglements, add a constraint round against reverse de la Riva or a light ashi-garami: your only goal is to clear the structure with a high step — over the top, never low through the hooks — and land past it. No finish. Tap the clean pass, not a submission. Repeat weekly for six weeks, and passing will stop being a scramble you survive and start being a catalog you consult.
Ryan's passing system is a complete, guard-by-guard architecture built on top of a universal problem. To place it:
The relationship to guard passing generally is the relationship of a finished encyclopedia to an open question. Everyone must beat the guard; what Ryan added was the insistence that "the guard" is not one thing but a catalogue of known things, each already solved — and that a passer's job is to recognize which one is in front of him and turn to the right page.
Publication date will be set at ingest. This log will be appended to over the life of the article. Any factual corrections will be dated and specific.
Publication draft prepared 2026-08-07. Awaiting hero image (needs permissioned photo — placeholder pre-launch). Source-check pass required before scheduling.
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