Update #40: Jakob747 goes out in style as shalgo realizes the inevitable and officially wins 2024
That's it! The 40th week of the CQ Game is the last one for 2024, as there are no races ranked .1 or above left in the calendar year. Some players may have long since started making lists and looking towards next season, but there is some cause to celebrate at the end of this year for some players as well.
This Week's Top Scorers
Jakob747 finishes the season in fine style, their team winning their fourth week of the season and second win in three weeks - they had wins in week 2, 28, 38 and 40, as well as 4 other top 4s through the year. Their team's signature approach of selecting fewer consensus picks and mining underappreciated talent leads to some big weeks when everything lines up, and this final week of 2024 is exactly that. This week, their win is propped up by a big win in China by Lennert Van Eetvelt (230 points, 10 teams), a nice win in Italy by Corbin Strong (150, 3) and some good placings in Italy as well by Davide De Pretto (82, 2). To top things off, Jakob also had between 20-40 points sprinkled in from 5 more riders.
Fairly close behind in 2nd place is ray10, who had a different collection of rare picks including Oscar Onley (163, 17), Romain Gregoire (144, 6), and unique pick Ethan Vernon (112 points), as well as 18-52 points from 5 other riders. HoudiniCycling finishes a relatively distant third 130 points behind, but makes the podium largely on the strength of Van Eetvelt and Onley.
This Week's High Movers
With the clock running out on the season, this was the last chance to move up and Jakob made the most of it, doubling up and moving up 7 spots in the last week of the season to finish a very fine 13th overall. Completing the 'all-number-team-name' podium is nbfc1962 and vsd88, each moving up 6 spots and powered by Van Eetvelt and Onley respectively.
Green Jersey Competition
It's all coming up Jakob this week. I mentioned in updates the last two weeks that Jakob's team was within striking distance of Googolplex and Amethyst, both of whom were Pogacar-dependent teams meaning they were unlikely to score this week, and Jakob's team entered this week needing 31 points to move from 3rd to 1st in the standings. And of course, with 45 for the weekly win, that was more than enough. Jakob's team got 108 points in the last three weeks to end the season on a tear and win this sub-competition. Congratulations!
Googolplex and Amethyst complete the overall podium for this ranking, taking a very fun chance by both picking Pogacar, whose CQ price was already the highest CQ score since CQ was created. Of course, that gamble paid off as Pogi leveled up to god mode, and it was enough to top the standings on many of his dominant weeks, but not quite enough to fend off Jakob747 in the end. It's likely that if only one of them had taken a chance on Pogi then either would have won, but they balanced each other out and split spots depending on the week. Regardless, a tip of the hat to both!
Top 10 Overall
It's time to formalize what has been evident for some time - shalgo is the official champion of the 2024 CQ Manager Game! Their team coasts into the end of the season with a mere 98 points on the week, and while that does mean that they can't say they won by a nice round 1500 points, we can round up from the 1499 point difference to 2nd place, really. I'm not one to keep these types of stats, but I think the amount of weeks that they led this game has to be the most for a champion, and the margin is incredible. Is shalgo Slovenian? Did they switch CQ Game trainers this year? Whatever the case, their team is the (dominant and deserving) winner.
I mentioned last week that Squire had the inside track on 2nd place but it was pretty close below that all the way down to 8th, and indeed this week shook things up. Squire's 276 weekly points did enough for their team to finish in 2nd place overall, by 75 points. But below that, Gotland and HoudiniCycling each finished in the top 4 on the week and parlayed that into 5-spot leaps in the overall. Gotland had the inside track and ended up taking the final podium spot at the end. Further down, the top 10 names stay the same as last week with no one moving in or out, but with the aforementioned leaps there were some corresponding falls, including EvansIsTheBest and Earns1985 falling to 5th and 8th respectively after spending much of the last few months on the podium. A shoutout to the very consistent performances that resulted in a top 10 this year for MADRAZO, JumboVismaFan, Salvarani and adamski101.
And that's it! That's the end of the CQ Manager Game for this year. I'll open up a new thread by mid-December as usual, and in the meantime, feel free to have post-mortems/off-season discussion here, make your lists for next year, and get annoyed that the guys you chose this year are winning on the track and cyclo-cross courses more than they did for you on the road.
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