Let’s face facts: coL isn’t doing well this season. They’re 1-2, they’ve scored the least amount of points this season (through the weekend), and Belle has been an anchor. I’m not sure if “anchor” does her score (1-15) justice, but that’s a different story. Because as far as I’m concerned, they actually got a leg up on the competition with a small, largely unpublicized move: hiring Alex Garfield as their assistant general manager.
It probably won’t have an immediate impact unless he gets a sex change and takes up DoA4, but it’s part of a larger thought: the organization that uses the CGS setup to their advantage is setting themselves up for years of success.
The CGS allows for a lot of new things. Trades, drafts, taxi-teams, and scouting across four different games are pretty much new features in eSports. They’ve been done on a small scale before, but never as part of a professional gaming league. Hiring Garfield (no word on Odie, yet) lets coL do more things. They can scout better, evaluate more talent, handle more decisions, and be familiar with more people and games. When you’re building a franchise, those things are absolutely necessary.
Let’s illustrate with an obvious example: statistics. Baseball has all kind of crazy statistics and systems for evaluating players. They keep track of everything except who eats the most amount of sunflower seeds. Just look at what’s available to the general public through Yahoo. Here are some basic statistics for Alex Rodriguez. (Thanks for making me #1 in my fantasy league, buddy!) They’re sitting right there on his player card. Of course there are whole websites dedicated to keeping even more ridiculous statistics.
It’s way too much to break down individually, but basically, a player or team in a slump has 100 different tools to help them evaluate exactly what’s going wrong and how to fix it.
So, tell me, who’s the best clutch player in eSports? Who hits the highest percentage of flick-shots? Let’s go back to Belle for a concrete example. Why is she 1-15? Are her moves being blocked or avoided too easily? Is she not blocking or counter-attacking well enough? When you’re 1-15, it’s probably a little of both, but I don’t think anybody can give concrete evidence about which it is or how much of each.
Instead, we have anecdotal evidence. I saw a player do “x”. This guy owned at “y” LAN. “Z” has one of the best rifles/AWPs in Source. In other words, we are where baseball was in the early 1900s. It’s not hard to imagine an organization becoming a dynasty back then if they had the information we have now. They could evaluate talent more accurately, and thus make better trades and draft picks. Drafting and trading translates pretty well to eSports, now that the CGS is here, and that’s where Alex Garfield comes in.
He might not have those statistics, but his hiring is an indicator that coL has the right mindset. More people can do more work. I’m not sure what Jason Lake, their GM, has in mind, but personally I’d split up the four games. Let Garfield handle the majority of DoA4 and PGR scouting, for example. That way, he can focus on those two games and get a better feel for upcoming talent, freeing up Lake to do the same for CS:S and FIFA ’07. At the very least, coL has another opinion on player talent across the board, and that could be a big advantage. I don't expect them to dominate for thirty years just because they hired one guy. But for right now, two guys is double what the other organizations have.
It comes down to two questions: for LA, would it be worth trading Storm and Belle to Dallas for Rasberry Tea (DoA4 Female) and brawwwr (CS:S taxi-team)? Would Storm’s impact make that worthwhile for Dallas? The first organization to figure that out will be in great shape, and in my opinion, Garfield’s hiring is a sign of good things to come for LA.
