Yeah but you wouldn't be wearing a gi in bare feet on the mean streets either... EDIT: I'd also like to add that if you want to talk about training from a self-defense perspective, then you should practice as many different positions and as many different ranges as possible. It's often not a question of wanting or choosing to go to a "bad" position like the turtle: it's quite possible you'd find yourself there after getting jumped/hit/kicked, especially if you weren't expecting the attack. I dunno about you, but if I was preparing myself for the "mean streets", I'd like to feel confident that I could get myself out of positions like the turtle as quickly as possible. Banning its use in tournaments, thereby effectively removing it from the training syllabus, isn't really the best way to learn how to deal with the position. Unfavourable, difficult positions should be trained more, not less often.
I think a fairly straightforward way of discouraging turtling as a defensive strategy would be simply to award points for taking an opponents back. Then you don't need to ban anything you just give people an incentive avoid a stalling tactic which is in actuality quite a bad habit to get into outside of a judo tournament. If someone is rolling around the floor attacking you then rolling onto your stomach is not much of a defence. Although to be fair there are similar limitations for the guard as a useful strategy when you add in striking or more than one opponent.
I'm not being defensive so much as trying to point out the world in which high level Judo operates and how different it is to many other Martial arts, the people in charge don't care about what essentially boils down to style vs style debates. This is the interesting thing here that illustrates why this matter is more complex than it appears to be though, there have been very few changes to Judo's newazza rules in the last forty years, the only thing I can see is that they've reduced the time for a pin to become Ippon to twenty seconds, there's been no other explicit rule changes but at the same time newazza has become less and less emphasised. The reason is more to do with a change in the focus of the ref's as opposed to anything else. What I've heard is that becoming a high level ref in Judo is impossible if you are seen to allow too much time for newazza. Greco Roman wrestling bans any hold beneath the waist, there are plenty of successful Greco Roman guys in the UFC (Randy Couture for example) and while they no doubt have cross trained before entering you can stills ee distinct hints of their background. Also, leg grabs are not banned from Judo, they're banned as an initial attack. If I lunge in at you're legs to perform morote gari thats a foul but if I try to sweep you're leg then go for morote gari that is legit and leg grabs were still a high scoring move in the tournaments this rule has been trilled in. As I said before leg grabs are not removed, they simply have to be a part of a combination of throws. As for rules to punish overt defensiveness, well thats been the issue in high level Judo for the last ten years or so. The tried outlawing unorthodox grips but people circumvented that in no time, they tried including a penalty for passivity next and people learned to grip their opponent to neutralise their attacks so they could put in fake attacks, for example taking a right on left inside grip and tapping their left leg with you're right to fake ashiwazza. Judoka absolutely need to learn how to defend a DLT but they do in part know how to do this from Judo still and my point is that high level Judoka are better served developing upper body based throws and that they are skilled enough grapplers that learning to sprawl on a shot and perform one is trivial by comparison. I'm objecting to other people's objections to the rules because I don't think they fully understand them, I don't like the rules myself but it's important to understand them in their context. They have got a positive side and are well intentioned, they just aren't going to work.
The IJF's approach to restricting newaza is no less of a restriction because it is not an official rule change. These new rules are evidence that they're just going to keep piling more and more restrictions onto the sport. What's so sad about it is that if you just allowed more time to attack in newaza no one would want to do crappy fake drop kata gurumas and morote gari because of the terribly weak position you find yourself in if you have to defend for more than two seconds.
