While Sayaplayer retired from Overwatch League yesterday to announce his pick-up by T1, other players haven’t been as lucky as they suddenly;y find themselves LFT early in the offseason of Overwatch League as they have just ended the 2020 Grand Finals.
On the chopping block have been three Outlaw players, and Florida Mayhem was close behind them with three drops of their own: Junsu ‘Kris’ Choe, San-ha ‘Karayan’ Choi, and Seoung-Joo ‘Byrem’ Lee.
Where the Outlaws ended up intentionally crippling their DPS line-up, the Mayhem have done so with the support line: only one support player, Namjin ‘Gangnamjin’ Kang is the last surviving member as both Kris and Byrem were removed.
San-ha ‘Karayan’ Choi was a tertiary tank that stood with the impressive lineup of Pan Seung ‘Fate’ Koo and Beom-jun ‘Gargoyle’ Lee; the tank player being removed from the roster will likely not impact the Florida team greatly.
Looking forward, however, and it’s difficult to discern who the Mayhem are looking towards; the Mayhem is a full South Korean team after being shifted over in 2019 following a string of difficult losses, and the current pool of players within South Korea looking to step onto the stage is immense, even if we lock our scope to APAC stages.
Thankfully, Korea hasn’t been hit by a player draw to Valorant in the same manner that North America has been, at least not yet.
Thus, the Florida Mayhem likely have a large pool of candidates that would likely jump at the opportunity to play Overwatch professionally within the league.
That being said, the vast majority of support players that will need to be tapped for Overwatch League are underaged, and those that are of age will likely be hotly contested by the twenty teams; we could see a few new records for support-player purchases during this offseason, and we’ve only barely begun.
This being said, the move is still a bit surprising from the Mayhem; they ended their 2020 season in 6th out of twenty teams with 17 wins and 7 losses, ending just above the New York Excelsior. Comparing to the Houston Outlaws, who have similarly dropped three players thus far, who ended up 16th for the 2020 season. They are one of many teams looking for a refit, and at that, they aren’t even among the organizations that have dropped everyone from their team.
This already is a far cry from what we’ve seen in the 2019 offseason, and some are proposing that teams may be eyeing an exit after a spotty year; those rumors are currently unsubstantiated.
