We’re past the midway point of the Riot CLoL regular season after Saturday’s Week 4 matches. Like a fine extra-virgin olive oil mixed with Poland Spring, we’re seeing a more defined separation between the top and bottom teams across all regional brackets.
It’s not looking spectacular for USC, who just suffered a close 1-2 loss against the 9th place Santa Clara Broncos. They’re now 2-2 in 30th place with two games left to catch up.
Graduate student Jungle Arthur “Wuju Senshi’ Bookstein thinks there’s a possibility.
“I definitely feel like everyone on the team has improved immensely since our first scrims together. Last weekend really showed that, even though we didn’t end up winning that match. It was an extremely close best of three series,” he said.
Looking farther up the West Conference standings, we see some familiar faces from the days of Pac-U, with Cal and ASU undefeated so far, and University of Washington, CU Boulder and Utah all at 3-1.
Going by match wins to losses, the top four teams of Cal, UCSD, UC Riverside and ASU are the teams to beat, but the opponent match win percentage (OMW) stat which takes into account the win percentages of the teams they play, put Cal in first place so far.
But that’s just the Western conference. CLoL is split up into four main regional conferences: North, South, East and West, and each has their own cohort of notable teams. The Northern conference especially is stacked, with Maryville, Colombia and Illinois all competing for the top spots. Maryville has nothing left to prove at this point, but could see competition from a Colombia team that saw great success at last year’s tournaments.
But so far, the four teams leading the nation rank as follows:
| Conference | Team | Wins | OMW% | W% | OOMW% | Points |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| East | Harrisburg University Storm | 4 | 64.5 | 100 | 57.68 | 12 |
| North | Redbird Esports (Illinois State) | 4 | 58.25 | 100 | 61.875 | 12 |
| West | UC Berkeley | 4 | 58.35 | 100 | 60.489 | 12 |
| South | UT Dallas | 4 | 58.25 | 88.889 | 59.583 | 12 |
Being an esports league, stats are readily available, and Battlefy, the hosting site, has some fun statistics on individual performance as well.
Looking at individual players’ KDA, UCSD’s Syarif leads the pack at 33.
| Team | Player | KDA |
|---|---|---|
| UC San Diego | Syarif | 33 |
| University of Delaware | Joseph "Im Given" Im | 31 |
| UC San Francisco | Fonso | 31 |
| UC Irvine | The Iceflower | 30 |
| University of Illinois | Josh "Xeno" Park | 30 |
| University of Houston | Hi im ban | 24 |
| Illinois Wesleyan | Iwu Nivec | 23 |
| Oakland University | Dok | 21 |
| Harrisburg University | LikeAMaws | 17 |
| Virginia Tech | Supaheric | 16 |
We can also see which teams are padding their stats most effectively, and get a glimpse into the skill gap between them and the rest of the conference. Of course, this will be better seen once we get further into the season and later into playoffs.
| Region | Team | KDA |
|---|---|---|
| East | UC Irvine | 11.4 |
| East | Harrisburg University | 11.3 |
| West | UC San Diego | 8.5 |
| West | Cal State Fullerton | 8.2 |
| South | Winthrop University | 7.9 |
| North | Maryville University | 7.5 |
| North | Indiana | 7.4 |
| West | Arizona State University | 7.3 |
| North | Illinois State | 7.2 |
| South | George Mason University | 6.8 |
Individual stats like these don’t necessarily lead to wins, especially when it comes down to playoffs where an individual player may not have the opportunity to post such big stats in tighter games. The question is which team or player can keep their positions as the weeks increase.
Annenberg Media Esports will be posting these stats weekly in our #weekly-ranks channel in our Discord.