Interview with MAD Lions analyst Morgan "BigTime" Jay

Yoann: Hello, everyone! Today I'm with MAD Lions’ analyst BigTime. Would you like to introduce yourself to everyone?

BigTime: Yeah. So my name's Morgan Jay, also known as BigTime, and I am the assistant coach slash analyst for MAD Lions.

Yoann: Okay, cool. So how and when did you get into Esports?

BigTime: Valorant was my first esport. Esports was always like a little dream for me, but I never thought it would become a reality until Valorant came out during lockdown. I found it so deeply interesting that I just wanted to keep pursuing it and keep going.

It helps that I have my brother Bambino. He works with OGLU. So we both went for it together and said, like, let's see how far we can take this in Valorant. And it still feels like a dream to work in esports; it’s my number one job.

Yoann: What is your job as an analyst, and how can you help your team?

BigTime: I think of myself as a little Swiss army knife. I do a little bit of everything. I would mostly say a lot of my work is assistant coaching. I'm in the scrims daily with the guys talking to them and helping them. Essentially. If they want me to find lineups, I will go find lineups. I'll do that if they need me to watch each player individually. If they need me to track data so we can get more out of every scrim, I'll do that. But I’m also working on macro strategies and antistratting. I’m trying to help the team in any possible way.

Yoann: Okay. Very interesting. What is the hardest play style to play against, in your opinion?

BigTime: Oh, that's tough. There's like a whole spectrum of how rigid teams are. So you have some teams like DRX in Korea where it's built around set pieces, they're super well drilled and have really efficient protocols, but they are kind of easy to read into because they can become predictable. 

Then you have the looser and more fluid teams. The more reactionary a team is, the harder it is to read into that play style because they respond to each situation instead of it being built around executes. And that's always difficult to deal with.

Yoann: And which team would you like to play against in the near future?

BigTime: Paper Rex for sure! I think they're my favorite team right now, they're so fun to watch. They're just electric on the server. Plus, it's expertly coached.
In terms of like actual aspirational, I’d love to play teams like fanatic or FPX. 

Yoann: Do you think that scrims show the full potential of a team?

BigTime: I think it really depends on the team. Some teams like to try a lot more and do a lot of different stuff in scrims. A team like M3C, for example, every time we scrimmed against them, they were doing something different. They're playing a different comp. They're doing weird things.

Sometimes we do well, and it feels nice to do well against very good teams. But I think there's always a degree of separation between Scrims and official matches, you can learn from them, but you can't read their results.

Yoann: About Pearl, did you already scrimmed? Is the map interesting?

BigTime: Yeah, we've played some games on pearl, and I love it. It's really fun to play scrims on new maps because every team has an entirely different approach. You can see a team do something and say, “oh that’s a really cool way that they've done that. Okay, let's steal that.” Or they run an entirely different agent composition you can learn from.

For me, it's one of the more fun maps to play and coach on.

Yoann: What are your thoughts on the new franchising program?

BigTime: It’s really interesting to see what they have done with League of Legends, how they've managed to maintain and grow the league to be the biggest eSport in the world through franchising. I have to trust that they know what they're doing, and this is their second go with it. They can make the changes that they need.

Yoann: Who will you be supporting during champions this September?

BigTime: I always support EMEA, and I always get joy when we beat NA. before I even started getting involved in this environment, I was a big fan of TeamLiquid, like way back in the day. If it's not EMEA I hope PaperRex does really well. Yeah. I think that that would be my dream final, like Fantic versus Paper Rex or something like that. Maybe FPX. Those kinds of teams are the ones I always go for.

Yoann: Where can we find and support MAD Lions? 

BigTime: Yeah, feel free to follow me first, @BigTimeVAL1, and then you can follow the MadLions Twitter accounts. They have a Spanish one (@MADLions) and they have an English one (@MADLions_EN). You can see what's going on with us for next season.

Yoann: Perfect. Thank you so much for the interview, and I hope everything goes well in the future for your team!

BigTime: Thank you very much!