No more winter blues Collegiate Rocket League fans, Rocket League’s student league will be returning for its third season this spring. Open qualifiers will begin Feb. 16 and the conference championships will run through March 20.
This will be the first ever spring edition of Collegiate Rocket League. The tournament has a prize pool of $50,000 in scholarship prizes.
Gone is the round robin format of seasons prior and in its place is a March Madness style 64 team bracket broken up into four regions. Fall and summer Collegiate Rocket League featured four region based regular seasons with eight teams participating in each region. After the season there was a playoff to determine who advanced to the final eight team tournament. That round robin format is a thing of the past.
According to the official rules, the spring season will completely circumvent the regular season. Instead there will be four 16 team brackets that will determine the four conference champions who will compete for the national championship.
The participants from Fall Season will fill up the first eight spots in each region. Top teams from the open qualifier will fill the other eight slots in each bracket.
The new format is very reminiscent of the NCAA Basketball tournament and creates more opportunities for upsets and Cinderella teams. It will also be the largest scale Rocket League tournament in the esport’s history.
Seeding for the bracket will likely be determined based on positioning in the Fall season and how teams place in the qualifying tournament. The single elimination style is also new to the competition. Both of the last two seasons featured double elimination playoffs.
Probably? Psyonix’s press release states that “the Spring Season will be focused on finding four conference champions to claim their share of $50,000 in scholarship prizing.” The official rules also mention “prizing is distributed amongst teams proportional to official matches each player played starting in Conference Stage through Grand Finals.”
That sure makes it sound like there will be a face off between the four conference champions. The $50,000 prize pool will be divided among the top four finishers in each region. Fall Season had the exact same regular season prize pool, but added another $25,000 prize pool for the National Championship. It would make sense for Psyonix and Tespa to recreate the Fall success.
The extra $25,000 from the Fall came with an outstanding LAN in Arlington, Texas. Given the 14.5k views December’s LAN provided, it seems inevitable that there will be another National Rocket League Championship.
Registration is open now through Feb. 14. The open qualifier will be Feb. 16 and 17 and Conference Championships will begin on Feb. 25 through March 20. Catch all the Collegiate Rocket League action on twitch.tv/rocketleague.
Feature image courtesy of Rocket League Esports.
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