The Best Head Coach Of Overwatch 1
While coming up with a list of the best players of all time in each respective role, most of the top choices fell into place once I had defined the ruler with which I was going to measure the field. Aspects like longevity, peak performances, accolades, and special attributes of the player based on eye-test and statistics became the focal point of the examination. The feedback I got was that these features were overall acceptable, though some disagreed on the weight I attached to them. Fair enough, they are as much a reflection of what I believe to make people win at Overwatch as they are of how good those players actually were.
However, there was one topic that got stuck in the drafts over that period: The Best Head Coach of Overwatch 1. While the evaluation of the Head Coach position is the natural follow up to naming the Greatest Six, the chosen metrics for players didn’t feel adequate to loosely throw over the Head Coach role. While we had hundreds of hours of players doing their job live on broadcast, we rarely got a glimpse of the actual work that Head Coaches were doing behind the scenes.
At best, we were looking at the hypothetical proof of a job well done in the form of victories, but with numerous different effects of individual coaching styles that any individual could point out as a deciding factor.
Some questions seemed a challenge to answer satisfactorily: What does the Head Coach job entail? If a head coach's impact is felt more in the buildup to the season rather than the individual matches themselves, how big a slice of that pie is the ability to scout talent? What if his General Manager has a bigger role than in other organisations? Is it luck or an intrinsic quality that leads one head coach to receive a bigger budget than another? Is the sole job of a Head Coach to win a season title or is it also to employ strategies towards achievements like MVP trophies for his players as well?
We had Head Coaches in personal union as General Managers both in spirit and title over various seasons and especially in a practical sense without it having entered public discourse. Some Head Coaches may excel at interpersonal relationships but will know relatively little about deep Overwatch strategy and that’s just what their team needs.
Having seen and even participated in backroom talks about the individual abilities of each Head Coach, one thing is clear - they frequently fail to have much predictive power about the future success of said Head Coach. Betting on the success of even the best head coaches based on these inside talks would have lost you money. It turned out that these players and coaches too often had very different opinions of what a Head Coach should be. In fact, these other coaches with overly harsh criticism failed to outperform the likes of Moon, Crusty, Rush, NineK, and others in their own careers, likely due to ignorance of the special sauce the best brought to the table. Perhaps they would disagree and put it down to luck. You do you, naysayers.
Going through old DMs and notes on past conversations on the top candidates for the best Head Coach of Overwatch 1, therefore, didn’t prove fruitful. "Does very little", "only charismatic", "knows less about the game than players", "forces his ideas about the game too much", and more are liberally used about Head Coaches of all tiers of achievement. In the same vein, you will find positive feedback which attributes outstanding abilities in all areas to Head Coaches in a similar range. In short, those assessments would barely beat a coin flip.
Moreover, a definition of what a Head Coach does beyond "contribute in all ways that makes their team more successful" felt too nebulous. How could I possibly evaluate that? And when all hope seemed lost and I evaluated my ability to evaluate such a job which felt like biting my own teeth, I realised that the achievements were the closest you could possibly get to judge a Head Coach and that the chances of someone freeloading and lucking their way into a top spot was exceptionally low and lower than perhaps commonly thought.
One last addendum I have to make is a counterpoint to a frequently and credibly brought up argument against my weighting. Many feel that more recent seasons should receive a sort of "recency bias"-bonus because the later years showed higher levels of play. While I don’t disagree with that, I don’t think it necessarily indicates how hard it was to win a season. How challenging something is has to be evaluated against the environment at the time. If a team managed to stand out more despite a lack of sophistication of the league, it indicates that it was likely just as hard to win season 2 as it was to win season 4. An argument that would make me believe that it was easier for the Shock to win than it was for the Dragons last season would therefore have to prove that everyone tried less and that the experience was less strenuous, and that game knowledge was readily available without anyone making effective use of it. None of that seems obvious to me when comparing say season 2 and season 4 against each other. If anything, the large number of games during the first seasons would speak to the opposite.
The Best Head Coach Of Overwatch 1 - Runner-Ups
Given the relatively limited field of coaches who were able to work all four seasons in some capacity and therefore build out their legacy at the highest level, it won’t surprise you that there are realistically only two candidates, Crusty and Moon, who should be in the running for the top spot.
Other coaches like NineK, Apage, Changgoon, Pavane, but also Sephy and Dpei should be acknowledged for their contributions to Overwatch esports while the consistently biggest successes have not stuck to them to the same degree as it did to the top candidates.
The runner-up to these two who unfortunately came too late to the top league is Dallas Fuel’s Rush. In both of his seasons in the Overwatch League, he has lifted a tournament trophy with teams that were expected to be good but perhaps not among the absolute best. Building on a strong core of players he himself helped to develop in Element Mystic, he has elevated several more top-tier players into some of the best teams in the world. With a levelled playing field in Overwatch 2, he is the front runner as the heir to the two kings if they were to be overtaken.
Click to enlargeThe Best Head Coach Of Overwatch 1 - The Two Kings
Crusty
2x Grand Finals Winner
1x Stage Title Winner
2x International Tournament Winner
Moon
1x OWL Grand Finals Winner
2x OWL Regular Season Winner
1x Stage Title Winner
2x International Tournament Winner
2x Regional Tournament Winner
Click to enlargeWho took the crown of the best Head Coach of Overwatch 1 is a decision that I’ve gone back and forth on several times, helping to really illuminate what I perceive to be the definition of success in Overwatch. If we value playoff peaks as an important measure of consistency, it might not surprise you that the one additional Grand Finals victory Crusty has over Moon doesn’t appear to phase me much and feels equalised by Moon having won the regular season back to back. However, we should not discard that the regional split in season 3 and 4 has put an asterisk on that achievement.
Moon’s often overlooked first season also reasonably stands up to Crusty’s achievement on a shoestring budget with the Boston Uprising. Coming in second in the regular season and winning a stage title in stage 4, later only falling to eventual champions the London Spitfire in the bracket, Moon’s first season was rather successful. While no immediate miracles with the Shock during season 1 after Crusty’s transfer to the team in stage 4 could be expected of Crusty, it should still be acknowledged as a smudge on his resume. Speaking of dark spots, Moon’s second season with the Los Angeles Valiant and its inherent meme factor is a significant blemish to his legacy but one he could fortunately recover from. While not nearly as bleak, Crusty still failed to make it to a Hawaii tournament in season 4 a single time, losing his grip of dominance over his region.
In terms of being able to pick diamonds out the rough, just look at each coach’s results: LIP and Izayaki versus Striker and ANS have a comparable ring to their name. From there, the similarities between the two coaches seem to depart as Moon appeared to be assembling his exodia squad which may arguably have become the best starting six of all time in the Shanghai Dragons of season 4, building on players Moon had picked up and built relationships with during his career. While Moon assembled a behemoth, it felt like Crusty was building his deck on the fly, using some of the old cards given to him by the Shock but also choosing to integrate others.
Aggregating all those factors, it’s likely that even an all-knowing truth machine would spit out that these Head Coaches were objectively only separated by single-digit percentage points of performance differences. Given the aforementioned futility in accurately assessing a Head Coach’s performance and the neck and neck nature of these two careers, the answer shouldn’t matter to you as much as the motions we went through to get there and yet you will feel a certain way when you hear me declare that Crusty was my best Head Coach of Overwatch 1 esports history.
Too rapidly distinct were the performance improvements wherever he landed, too dominant over an extended period of time were his team, too impressive, too ferocious. He maintains functional teams across language barriers, and his worst performances never stooped to the lows of Moon's with no Contenders retour needed. His teams are unmistakably Cursty-led, expressing his strong leadership, strategic genius for many meta archetypes that have defined OWL, and a willingness to experiment (for better or for worse), finding unorthodox solutions to most problems the competition tries to confound him with. For that, Crusty is my best Head Coach of Overwatch 1.
