The Florida Mayhem are a bottom three team and have been since the beginning of Overwatch League Season 1. Despite there being a popular belief among the Overwatch community that Florida is improving, their map win rate says otherwise. Over the last three months of games, Florida has an overall map win rate of 27.75%, whereas their map win rate in matches over just the last month has decreased to 22.75%. The competitiveness of a team is irrelevant if they cannot win, and even more so when their map win rate is in decline. The Mayhem’s parent organization Misfits, needs to intervene before this team approaches the unchangeable public identity of Overwatch League laughing stock.
There are some nuggets of hope for the Mayhem. First of all, the Mayhem have finally committed to an all-Korean roster. Because of this, communication is already sounding much cleaner. They have also publicly announced that they are scouring Korean Contenders for new players and coaches to fill out their roster. The core of the Mayhem should be Ha “Sayaplayer” Jeong-woo, Lee “BQB” Sang-bum, Jo “HaGoPeun” Hyeon-woo and Choi “Kris” Jun-soo, and the new talent should be selected to compliment them.
Sayaplayer is objectively the only player on this roster with star quality. He is still considered one of the best hitscan players in the league, despite featuring on a losing team. According to Winston’s Lab player analytics, Sayaplayer is the second best overall Widowmaker player based upon all statistics in Overwatch League Season 2. He has the highest kill to death ratio of any player in the league with over ten minutes of Widowmaker played this season at 2.75.
When he played in OGN Apex Season 2, his statistics across all hitscan Heroes were only rivaled by Park “Saebyeolbe” Jong-ryeol. Lucio statistics are somewhat subjective, but what Kris brings to this team is great leadership and shotcalling. His greatest assets are his intangibles. Both coaches and players have always publicly praised him for this. And together, Sayaplayer and Kris have a storied and successful history together. To round out the Mayhem core is HagoPeun and BQB, both players have proven their worth this season.
Meta Athena: The History
When one looks to the future, it is often past experience that guides them forward. For the Florida Mayhem, it may be important to consider from where Kris and Sayaplayer began. It was on a team that battled their way into OGN’s Apex through an offline challenger series and looked set to be one of the most dominant Korean teams the world had seen.
The name of the team was Meta Athena, and they boast one of the most impressive lists of alumni among pre-Overwatch League teams (listed to the left). Meta Athena went undefeated in the Apex Challenger series playing against other successful teams like LW Red and Mighty AOD. This same Meta team were also undefeated in both the first and second group rounds of matches during OGN Overwatch Apex Season 2. This famous and historic run of results came against teams like LW Blue, EnVyUs and KongDoo Panthera. Meta Athena were poised to become one of the few all-rookie teams in Esports history to make it to the Finals without dropping a match.
Their signature playstyle was wacky, entertaining and original. Just watch this Mei rotation on Dorado for an example of this team’s in-game personality. In the tournament playoffs, they took Lunatic Hai, the best team in the world, to a map seven. Team Meta eventually finished in fourth and were praised as the most exciting team in Overwatch.
One of the most crucial pieces to their puzzle was Choi “Hoon” Jae-hoon. Hoon was known as a Zarya specialist at the time, and had put forth many of the absolute best Zarya performances ever witnessed. During the second season of OGN’s Apex tournement, Hoon recorded the second highest amount of kills per 10 minutes on Zarya (via Winston’s Lab). At the time, he was not known as a noteworthy D.Va. As time passed, however, Hoon switched to play on the Meta Athena sister team Meta Bellum and developed a seriously impressive D.Va to compliment his Zarya play.
Florida Mayhem: The Possible Solution
The Florida Mayhem are not good enough to win games in the Overwatch League. However Sayaplayer and Kris have shown that they can win against many of the Overwatch League players back in Korea on their old team Meta Athena. When seeking players to craft the perfect support for the aforementioned Mayhem core (Kris, Sayaplayer, BQB and HaGoPeun), there are many aspects to consider. Examples of player characteristics that should be scouted are flexibility, potential, existing synergies and intangible assets.
A player that would strengthen this Mayhem core would be Hoon. Without a doubt Koo “Xepher” Jae-mo is the weakest link in the current Mayhem roster. What is interesting however is that in their recent games Xepher has been flexing onto Zarya at times. This is to allow BQB to flex onto more DPS. What the signing of Hoon to the Mayhem would do is improve both the D.Va and Zarya play of this team, as Hoon could take over from BQB on the Zarya role to allow him to play Sombra. And when they want to play a D.Va composition with a Zarya, Hoon could then demonstrate his immense amount of D.Va potential.
The Florida Mayhem do not just have D.Va problems – they have the worst tank duo in the league by far. On Main Tank Yoon “Swon” Seong-won is seen often overextending and being bullied by other Main Tanks. It should be mentioned that Swon has looked much better after Florida began communicating exclusively in Korean.
To replace Swon on Main Tank, the Mayhem need not look any further than the same Meta Athena team from which Hoon shone on. Moon “ChangSik” Chang-sik is a name that may have lost a little bit of value recently. However, ChangSik had helped Meta Athena to much of their success. More recently, ChangSik was helping Fusion University with their 19 game win streak in North American Contenders. This streak was achieved while he played on high ping from Korea as well.
It was announced recently that ChangSik would be benched by Fusion University heading into the playoffs. Fusion Uni stated it was to avoid any performance errors that ChangSik may produce due to the high ping. This gives an opportunity for the Mayhem to recruit a newly benched ChangSik and offer him a chance to finally play in North America and in the Overwatch League. With Hoon and ChangSik, the Florida Mayhem would be fielding four players from that legendary Meta Athena team. The synergy would be instant, and the potential to perform well would also come quickly.
Conclusion
It must be stated that the likelihood of this may not be too high. The current rumors circulating on which players are being targeted by Florida include Choi “Karayan” San-ha on Main Tank. As well as Lee “Gargoyle” Beom-jun as a Flex player and Choi “DPI” Yong-joon as a DPS player. The most likely players players to be picked up by the Mayhem are Kim “Joy” Dong-hyun and Park “Arrow” Min-seok from Korean Contenders team O2 Blast. All of these players would be solid pickups for the Mayhem.
However, Meta Athena will always be a celebrated team in Overwatch history and it’s sad to see two of their most important players waste away on this Florida team (Sayaplayer and Kris). Hoon and ChangSik would both fill roles for the Mayhem that are in desperate need of an upgrade. They also have preexisting synergy with Sayaplayer and Kris and have also had success since their departure from Meta Athena. It seems like it would be a perfect fit and would be a grand reunion for an old, historic team.
(Statistics thanks to Over.gg)
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