I know how it works. You cheer and bite your nails every Saturday as you watch your favorite college football team either win or lose. If your college is good, you may even stay up on Sunday to see the new BCS standings. It’s tradition and you’re hooked. I get it.
Now imagine a world where instead of football, these matches were League of Legends. Now imagine this world is reality – because that’s where we are right now. IvyLoL is a league where colleges have League of Legends teams and compete with one another. While most of these universities are from the United States there have been some exceptions such as a few Canadian schools. These teams endure a season like any other sport and end with playoffs.
The prize pool consists of $5,000 and finishes off at a live event with the Texas eSports Association’s Lone Star Clash 2 in Austin Texas. What is there not to like about this? When you think about certain schools you think of their football program, where their team may stand in baseball, or how strong of a basketball program they have… but what about what sort of League of Legends players they have?
As Riot Games is trying to create a traditional level sport with League of Legends, I feel that competition at the collegiate level is a great pathway into that. College football has some of the strongest traditions in sports, why not try and see if that can carry over into video games? Personally, I love the idea of rooting for my ‘ole alma mater as I watch them play League of Legends vs. another college.
Now that’s something I could get down on every Saturday.
Historian, teacher, writer, gamer, cheat master, and tech guru: follow on Twitter @AndrewC_GZ
