Before I get into this, I have to point out that the Mixed and Women's finals were really excellent this year and the Men's final was a pretty brutal blowout.
Here is what happened:
Big surprises:
- Sockeye struggling as much as they did. I felt they were pretty overseeded at the 2, but they did much worse than I thought.
- Patrol getting last. And getting bageled by machine?! Crazy.
Less-Big surprises:
- Doublewide showed up ready to play in Sarasota, which makes my initial take on them look pretty good. This is a surprise if you believed the hype and seeding on them.
- High Five and Johnny Bravo not making quarters. I felt like they got caught on a difficult side of the bracket due to some pool play wackiness. But so it goes.
- Dig making quarters. Let's note that Babbitt was at nationals and basically carried them to quarters. Per the ultiworld live tweets, seems likely Dig would have not made it that far without Babbitt carrying them in big moments.
- Florida managing to win games with their style of play.
In conclusion, making picks like this is a tough prospect. There's definitely a lack of information on which to base this stuff, even if you keep your ears to the ground on all of the content being created. Too many unsung great players buried on these rosters to be able to make clear picks. I think it's easier to identify the top few teams, but outside of that there's a ton of noise. There's also a lot of variance from the games themselves, as you'd expect. It's easy to say after the fact "oh, well revolver was a clear champ from day 1", but if you look at it at a micro level, if a few throws were an inch or two to the right or left, we might be talking about Ring of Fire's first title. As Bruns said this weekend, probably better to look at the results as a Bayesian update, more than predetermined outcomes.
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