I’ll lead with the answer:
They do fine.
First timer captains do marginally worse than “veterans” (more on what that means in a bit). The most straightforward way to present that is through average placement numbers (lower being better):
The average of first timer captain placements is 4.23 (4.30 excl. 6 team divs)
The average of all captains overall placements is 4.17 (4.22 excl. 6 team divs)
The average of “veteran” captain placements is 4.13 (4.19 excl. 6 team divs)
Note that these average numbers are a bit odd, primarily due to differences in format setups — some seasons allowed, as an example, for there to be a 3rd place team and a 4th place team, while other seasons saw that shared as a 3/4th placement. In general, teams that placed 3/4th or 7/8th were counted as having placed 3rd and 7th respectively.
I’d be fairly content leaving the topic at that, but there’s a bit more to talk about here. For example, a notable caveat to the above numbers is the fact that captains, particularly new ones, are presented with the option to have a known community member draft in their stead — and considering this entire debate tends to center around the player draft, it’s worth looking at how that impacts results (and, well, it does):
The average placement of first timers who did NOT draft their team is a staggering 3.0 (same when excluding 6 team divs), across 5 instances
That same number for first timers who DO draft their own team is a significantly worse 4.52 (4.5 without 6 team divs), across 21 instances
While this is a significant gap, it’s also accompanied by a sample size too low to read very far into. Nevertheless, it’s not particularly surprising.
Interestingly, first timers in Div 1 tend to drag down the averages. This too is unsurprising, as Div 1 tends to feature a wider range of MMRs from top to bottom, so knowledge of individual players becomes a bit more important. Let’s check the numbers:
Div 1 Average: 5.13, 8 instances
Div 2 Average: 3.57, 7 instances
Div 3 Average: 3.88 (4.0 excl. 6 team divs), 8 instances
Div 4 Average: 4.33, 3 instances
So, if you exclude Div 1, first timer captains bat an average placement of 3.83, better than veterans. This drops a bit should you exclude 6 team divs (to 3.87), and further down if you exclude captains who had someone draft for them — but only down to 4.0, still better than average.
Now, I could yap about all of this for a pretty long time, and in the interest of brevity, I’ll conclude this section with a breakdown of placements for first timer captains, should that interest you more than these average numbers:
Tl;dr: In 8 team divs, first timer captains finished in the top four 12 times, and in the bottom four 11 times. They do fine.
Sorting Rundown
I don’t intend to dwell on methodology too long, but it’s important to go over what a “first timer” is here.
I checked the esports profile of every individual who’s captained Clarity, scanning the Leagues tab for prior competitive experience before the season they captained. If they’ve played a full season of RD2L or Clarity, they were NOT considered a first timer.
Very notably, this didn’t include checking whether the event they played a full season of was division/auction based; in hindsight, it probably should’ve, but this a) introduces more work to an already tedious and boring task and b) doesn’t really make much of a difference, in my mind — if they stuck for a full season, they’ll have attained much of the necessary experience that first timers don’t have (and which is the focal point of arguments against their being captains).
If someone played a couple games of Clarity or RD2L, say, as a standin, but were never actually part of a team for a season, they were still considered first timers.
Once I’d separated the 26 first timer captains from the total count of 226 captains, I went through the Clarity draft channels to check whether they conducted their own player drafts. This was the case for 21 of 26, with the remaining 5 using replacement drafters. I was going to do this for the other 200, but realized soon enough this isn’t pertinent to this whole thing so I’ll leave that for another day.
One thing I did find interesting in all of this is that, when it comes to the captain hunt, it really is merciless: when it rains, it fucking pours. I kind of felt this as admin, but it was neat to see it in the numbers:
5 of 24 season 4 captains were first timers (20.83%)
5 of 26 season 6 captains were first timers (19.23%)
7 of 26 season 8 captains were first timers (26.92%)
Anyway. I have a sheet with all this stuff tucked away; I initially planned on putting it out alongside this post, but I want to tidy it up a bit (or, more likely, pass it onto someone else to do so) because it’s a bit of a mess. Shoutout to eisi for collating all placement info into a doc for me.
I will include one tidbit — this all also allows for the extraction of neat little trivia. For example, not including the current season, 51 people have captained more than once, and 17 more than twice — special shoutout to the latter group:
3 teams captained: Dodgy Dan, greenman, Kurou, NaClO, Panda, Sassy, STJ, Thronplunder, Waloo
4 teams captained: Bianco, Cloud, eisi, hi5, hungrybrowny
5 teams captained: Grimmjow, Snufkin
(I’m at 8, lol)
My Thoughts on the Debate
My take is fairly straightforward, and boils down to 4 points:
- I’ve been around too long to believe that veterans are guaranteed to do much better than first timers;
- Saying that first timers shouldn’t be allowed to captain is a complete non-starter, because otherwise we wouldn’t have enough captains;
- People who whine about first timers captaining while refusing to do so themselves should get significant chat mutes;
- The manager concept doesn’t work, so this is realistically the best option, especially considering first timers do completely fine.
All that being said, I will add that I don’t dislike greggy’s idea to make replacement drafters an opt-out for first timer captains, rather than an opt-in that they’re offered but not particularly pushed towards. I don’t know that it’s really necessary to do that — or that there is an actual need to do, well, anything — but should there be widespread insistence on a change, that seems like a reasonable step.
