In an early morning match on the second day of the Call of Duty 2015 Championships between Strictly Business and FaZe Black, most people did not expect to see SB victorious. When I cornered Jay “FrEaGy sB” Negran, one of the founders and co-owners of the Strictly Business team for a post win interview, he said he preferred it that way.
“I’d honestly rather us be the underdogs, because last year we were the underdogs and we won regionals and we got fourth at CoD Champs,” he said.
In the first round, Strictly Business sneaked a narrow lead in Hardpoint on the Detroit map. It was too close to call until the very end with SB stacking 218 points to FB’s 203.
It got scary for Strictly Business as FaZe Black won the next two games, one of which was Uplink on the Bio Lab map where they were pummeled 11-2. “It is hard to execute as well as they did when you are coming off of losses because you get demoralized.” he said about the losses.
With the match seemingly favoring FaZe Black, Strictly Business simply would not give up and won the following CTF game. “Winning that Capture the Flag was huge,” Negran said. “They knew that. That was the momentum changer right there, going to a game five.”
Strictly Business won that fifth game in the Search and Destroy mode. “Terrace SnD is actually one of our worst SnD matches,” he said. “The fact that we won against a team like FaZe Black was actually a phenomenon.”
In the group phase, they were matched up against heavy hitter Epsilon, the top ranked team in the EU Regional Finals. Jay under played the confrontation, however. “I wasn’t really worried about Epsilon,” he said. “I mean, North America plays the game totally different. Nothing against those guys, of course. They know how to play the game just as much as we do. Epsilon has good players, but we’re better.”
Unfortunately, Strictly Business couldn’t keep the wins coming, as they went up against Prophecy in round two of the winners bracket, and were dismissed from the tournament by OpTic Gaming.
