The community really loved Weed the People, ranking them 3rd in the league. I also put them up there at 4th. The main question here was if WRIG and Sir Cle would be decent supporting partners.
Meanwhile, Miami Ballphins weren't very liked by the community, getting ranked 11th due to questions about that second defender. I had someone else do my own power ranking and they put my team at 9th, so aligned with the community consensus.
Were there any expectations subverted with this game? Let's see!
Every half of this match was close except for that teeny, pesky G2H1. Can I please stop having one bad half every week of every season please? It's been happening since S17 and I can't shake it. Either way, G2H1 aside, the two teams were pretty solid. I guess the community either underestimated MIA or overestimated WTP, but either way it's always nice to get a win against a good team that's rated highly.
Jerry stole the show once again with a 96 ONISH and coming 2nd in hold this week with 562 seconds. He also had seven caps, so he accounted for more than half of MIA's caps. blackberry wasn't that good this week, but I'm chalking that up to her being rusty and just taking some time to get into the groove of things. She'll be stronger next week, I'm confident in that. Both WTP offenders had good stats, mainly because of that G2H1 but they're still good jukers. Sir Cle's probably gonna put his clip of him juking me in his Top Plays video and I'm going to hate it, but yea solid offenders.
I don't think anyone, even me, expected to see myself in the top five for prevent this week, and I don't know how it happened. Jarvis and I weren't that bad when it came to defense, with over 1200 seconds of combined prevent and coming 2nd for total team prevent this week, only behind LBT. Homie took over the game in returns and ended up leading the week in returns and tags and got the 100 DNISH and 10 DGASP, so congrats to him. WRIG was a decent support defender with the 55 DNISH and a supplemental 439 prevent.
Looking from the team stats, MIA was great at prevent, as evident by their prevent numbers and also coming second in P/HA. WTP had the edge in tags, returns, and pups, which makes sense since Homie led the week in returns and tags and WRIG likes pups. The main difference that I can see was the Score rates, with MIA having a 6.75% score, but WTP almost doubling that with 12%. That's the reason why MIA lost and WTP won. I can chalk our low score% up to smart game-sense from WTP ; they were always getting ahead and usually had three in base before we could communicate blocks. I can also say I'm not really good at holding blocks because I have a weak ball, so that's not fun. WTP also had a marginally better F/G and had more good handoffs than us, but MIA had more hold but more pops as well.
From Table B, MIA actually had the lowest team KD at 0.90, which probably meant that we had a lot of pops, which we did. 187 pops is the 5th most team pops this week. Other than that, MIA had a strong P/R number at 11.67, ranking 3rd, which is usually how it is when you rack up a ton of prevent. The biggest abnormality was MIA's Spark%, which was at a whopping 96.43%. That means that out of our 12 total caps, 11 of them were the result of self-produced grabs. It's a little worrying, because we only had the 7th most good handoffs, so the offense might not be working that well together or we're making a lot of solo grabs that end up resulting in flaccids. But it's still a huge number, so it warrants some mention. WTP had hte edge in Chain% with 76%, so that's a nice stat as well. WTP seemed pretty average in every stat, but they led MIA in almost every category in Table B, so they got the job done. I really want to see what the stats would look like if we removed G2H1 though.
CONCLUSION
MIA could get out and rack up the hold, but they couldn't convert those grabs into caps. Meanwhile, WTP managed to convert caps at double the rate of MIA, and were able to return the flag well while it was in the base, outside of the base is a different story. Also add MIA's pops and you can see why G2H1 happened, especially on a map that has a decent amount of spikes. WTP seemed to struggle a little bit against the MIA defense, while the MIA offense wasn't really able to string a regrab chain together. Overall, a split seems pretty fair, especially considering MIA's solid performance on Willow. Hopefully this moves MIA up a few spots in the community power rankings. If it doesn't, I'll feel sad.
