Pimp on Team Falcons: “They still have a lot to prove.”

First and foremost, I’m surprised that the Falcons were finally able to pull everything together. After all, we’ve been talking about this for eight months on this podcast—that the Falcons have enormous potential. It was just a matter of time before they finally found a way to improve their synergy and figure everything out. And let’s be honest: this probably wouldn’t have happened with kyxsan. A big part of the reason this happened is definitely karrigan. It’s not like zonic changed his coaching style or NiKo switched roles, and suddenly everything clicked. The only thing that changed was karrigan joining the roster. And that alone led to a host of other changes: NiKo started playing better, kyousuke suddenly stepped up and gained more confidence, and m0NESY continued to perform at a high level. 

Right now, karrigan is definitely doing more good than harm. But this is classic karrigan—and a sort of honeymoon period. He comes in, works his magic, and he’s incredibly good at it. He’s brilliant at quickly bringing a team up to its peak level in the short term. But history shows that in the long run, difficulties sometimes arise. That’s where a problem might arise. So right now, if we’re talking about staying in “Cinderella story” mode and marveling at what happened at the Major, I really love the fact that karrigan won the Major with the Falcons despite having the worst rating of any Major champion in history. At least, he had the worst stats for kills per round and frags per round among all Major winners. And I think that just adds some spice to the whole story.

The Falcons have finally won a Major, and that automatically makes them contenders for any trophy for the rest of the year, especially with a roster and players like these. But I’m not as confident in them as I would be, say, in Team Vitality. If Vitality had won this Major, I would have said, “Yes, they’ll take four more trophies by the end of the year.” I can easily imagine a world in which the Falcons won’t win a single major tournament this year. But I can also imagine a world where everything finally clicks and the team starts winning a lot. That’s why I’m still glad there’s still a question mark here. But now, at least, we know they’re capable of winning. If everything falls into place, if the players believe in karrigan, and if that “honeymoon effect” kicks in, then we’ve already seen that they can come together and win tournaments. But they still have a lot to prove. And, this might sound strange, but even after winning a Major, I still have a lot of questions. I still have no idea how strong this team will be. Will it just consistently make the top 4, just regularly make the playoffs, or will it start winning tournaments more often?

I’m really surprised that every Falcons player who talks about karrigan describes him almost as some kind of god who’s joined the team. As if he has some supernatural power that makes everyone around him better, and so on. And it seems to me that this brings us back to what we discussed in the last episode: when you have a captain you believe in, more often than not, it doesn’t even matter what specific call he makes. If the captain believes in it himself and presents it in a way that makes the other players start to believe it’s the right decision, then even a bad call can become a good one.