OpTic Texas may have finally met their match in the Call of Duty League, as the back-to-back world champions stormed through the Major 1 bracket before falling to Paris Gentle Mates at the final hurdle in a seven-game thriller.
Over the last two seasons, OpTic have turned up when it mattered most. A decent 2024 season finished with a world championship ring, the organization’s first in seven years.
Meanwhile, an incredibly shaky 2025 season saw a number of roster changes – very uncommon for OpTic – to finally settle on a roster that included Mason “Mercules” Ramsey, a hot young rookie who entirely changed the team’s trajectory.
Again, they won Champs in dominant fashion, with MVP Mercules leading proceedings and ensuring OpTic were, in every way, the best team in the league.
While they hadn’t performed brilliantly online, this LAN form carried on with ease into Major 1 2026, with OpTic not dropping a single map against Riyadh Falcons, G2 Minnesota, or Gentle Mates until the grand final – and that’s where it all unravelled.
Gentle Mates Return from Loser’s Bracket With a Vengeance
Despite losing 3-0 to OpTic in the Winner’s Finals, Gentle Mates knew they had plenty more in the tank, and they proved it.
A hard-fought match against FaZe Vegas in Loser’s Finals saw them win 3-2 and advance to the Grand Final, spearheaded by a legacy-defining performance from Travis “Neptune” McCloud, who went on the be named tournament MVP.
However, expectations for the grand final itself were somewhat slim. OpTic had looked so good, so dominant, that victory for the GreenWall almost seemed a foregone conclusion.
That confidence was broken immediately, however, as Gentle Mates carried their momentum right into the opening maps.
Grand Final Thriller
Map 1 saw them win 250-158, a ruthless map win to set the tone for the series, before a Search and Destroy Round 11 was once again settled in favor of M8.
OpTic then won the next two before trading a map each in the best-of-7, leaving it to Scar Search and Destroy as the deciding map.
M8 ended up winning the map 6-4, and thus taking the whole series by a scoreline of 4-3, ending the reign of OpTic in CDL competition.
While the team has looked like championship contenders since day one, there’s no point looking the part without actually doing the thing – and now they’ve done it, they’ll be hoping to go further and continue this form throughout the year.
While Neptune was the man of the tournament, and arguably making a name for himself as the best player in the game, the final series win was helped massively by Daunte “Sib” Gray. He registered a 1.30 KD, dealing over 18,000 damage – almost 3,000 more than the second highest, according to stats from Breaking Point.
OpTic’s Winning Record Hits Devastating End
By the time they reached the Major 1 grand final, OpTic were on a 12-game winning streak on LAN, spanning across CDL Champs 2025, Esports World Cup, and into the Major.
While not a record in the history of competitive COD – older fans will remember Complexity going on a 24-match winning streak on LAN – in the CDL era, this is both very difficult to accomplish and a very rare occurrence. It’s the kind of record we’ve only seen from serious dynasty-calibre teams like the Atlanta FaZe side of the Black Ops Cold War season.
There is now a short 2-week break before Major 2 qualifiers kick off, with a pretty different format. As Esports.net first reported before it was announced, Major 2 will only feature 10 teams total, and only 8 of those teams will actually reach the main bracket.
This will come following an 11-match qualifier split, as opposed to 7, meaning every team will play each other once.
The question now is whether Gentle Mates can keep this run of form up and go back-to-back.