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Evil Geniuses announced several major changes to their Counter-Strike: Global Offensive Academy rosters on Monday, including letting go of the entire EG White lineup, which was acquired nine months prior.
Evil Geniuses’ move to reconstruct their “Blueprint” initiative comes after a disappointing start to 2023. Per the announcement, EG White’s coach, Joseph “Muenster” Lima, will remain with the organization as the coach of EG Black. The merger between the two Academy lineups will allow Evil Geniuses to focus on one academy roster consisting of 10 players and their main team.
The organization’s Director of Athletics, Soham “valens” Chowdhury announced the change in an interview with Dust2.us, where he discussed how project Blueprint was coming along.
Evil Geniuses also took to Twitter to inform fans of the change, revealing that they were aware of the lackluster performance of their CS:GO team and were currently reevaluating their entire strategy.
The organization disclosed that their players would make efforts to improve on areas of “communication and individual performance gap between practice and match environments.” Evil Geniuses promised to compete in several tournaments this year to compensate for failing to qualify for the RMR and the approaching Paris Major.
“Additionally, we are also making the difficult decision of combining our Black and White rosters. We’ve learned a lot in the last ten months about how we want to support our academy program and are refocusing our efforts on the top ten players from our current 15-person roster,” the statement continued.
“Following this change, EG will still be the only North American CS:GO organization to be fielding both a main and academy roster, as our commitment to investing in and developing a pipeline of North American talent has not changed since the start of Blueprint.”
Reducing the roster from 15 players to 10 will see the departure of EG White players who previously competed as Party Astronauts. They include Ben “ben1337” Smith, Jonathan “Jonji” Carey, Josh “PwnAlone” Pigue, Khizar “Momo” Rehman, and Wesley “viz” Harris.
According to reports, EG Black’s current in-game leader Peter “stanislaw” Jarguz, will likely be replaced by Jadan “HexT” Postma on the academic roster. HexT’s place on the main lineup will be taken up ex Heroic/Sprout IGL Ismail “refrezh” Ali.
Evil Geniuses acquired Party Astronauts and Carpe Diem in June 2022 and signed them as part of the famous “Blueprint” project. The 15-player roster failed to meet up with expectations leading to EG’s most recent decision to turn it into a more standard academy project.
While EG Black were able to develop players like HexT and Jerric “wiz” Jiang, that moved up to the main team, EG White failed. Their most notable feat was winning the Fragadelphia 17 after beating BIG Academy in the final and other online ESEA Cash Cup wins.
