League of Legends: Picking Worlds matchups like College Bowl games

With several college football bowl games being played, what if League of Legends played a series of matchups to have their own series of bowls?

With the postseason of college football starting soon, we get treated to a month of games leading up to the National Championship. While League of Legends has something similar in the World Championship it isn’t an exact match.

In football, many more teams get to play in a bowl game if they have the magic number of six wins. In League of Legends if you don’t win your region, get enough championship points, or win a regional final you get left out. This has the potential to have fans miss seeing a lot more strong teams play on an international level. Yet never fear as your favorite team may appear in a bowl if Riot wanted to adopt this format.

More from Editorials

• Why It’s VETHEO’s fault that Excel are 1-5?!?
• 3 Tips to Rank Up in Season 13
• The LCK is the Premier League Scene
• Looking at Excel’s New Roster Ahead of 2023 LEC Winter
• Worlds 2022 Group Stage Tier List

I’m going to pick a series of bowl games and give them what I think would be their League matchup counterpart from teams that went to worlds.  The catch being you won’t see any matchups that were already played at Worlds in 2019 as repeat matchups. For example, G2 Esports and FunPlus Phoenix won’t meet again in a bowl game for the National/World Championship even if that disappoints you.

These would also be matchups played with the 2019 rosters that would have played in the Summer Split of a domestic league and prior to all of the free agent signings for the upcoming 2020 season. Let’s go bowling and check out these matchups:

SK Telecom T1 vs. FunPlus Phoenix

This matchup is pretty much a given since we didn’t get to see it at Worlds. It features two of the no-doubt best teams in the world. You have the 2019 Spring and Summer Playoff champion from the LCK and the LPL’s Summer Split champion that also finished first in the standings in both regular splits.

They were rated in our list as the top two teams going into Worlds 2019 and it was a disappointment these two teams didn’t get to play.  It was an easy choice to fit them in this bowl game.

G2 Esports vs. Invictus Gaming

This is another matchup with teams that made the semi-finals at the 2019 World Championship. G2 was the best western team in 2019, winning two LEC titles, the Mid-Season Invitational and finishing as runners-up at Worlds. There is no doubt this team is one of the best in the world and deserves this spot.

Invictus was a bit harder to place. They did win the Spring Split of the LPL and made it to the semi-finals at MSI. Yet they had to win their worlds berth in the regional finals and only had the three seed for the LPL. Yet I feel like the LPL is kind of like the SEC is in college football. They have a lot of talented teams that beat each other up head-to-head and in the end, one team emerges as the best and earns a spot in the playoffs for a shot at a National Championship.

The LPL had two champions during the different splits, as opposed to one, but I think that helps Invictus.  They have at least one Split title in 2019, while Griffin, Fnatic, RNG, Cloud9 – teams that might be considered from major regions as the possible best in the world – don’t.

Team Liquid did win both splits in the LCS, but I don’t think that matters. Team Liquid isn’t close to being a top-four team in the World, so doesn’t get this slot over Invictus gaming.