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The Ruddy Sack co-owners DonJake and IWDominate have spoken candidly about changes needed at The Ruddy Sack after they exited the NLC Winter 2025 playoffs this evening.
They were defeated 3-2 by Bulldog Esports in the Northern League of Legends Championship lower bracket quarter final.
It was a rollercoaster best-of-five, with Bulldog taking game one, Ruddy games two and three, and Bulldog the final two.
Bulldog’s win comes a few weeks after Bulldog beat The Ruddy Sack in the upper bracket. Despite this, Ruddy were arguably the favourites tonight, with players like Perkz and Jankos on their roster, as well as LIDER, Humzh and Hustlin.
That’s to take nothing away from Bulldog, who successfully ground out the win, with their roster of Mietek, Lulas, Kaymin, Exofeng and Kasing.
The news comes after Ruddy renamed to The Ruddy Sack, brought IWD on board as a co-owner and revealed their NLC Winter 2025 roster last month.
Next, Bulldog will face the winner of Verdant vs Rich Gang, and whoever advances will face Nord Esports in the lower bracket final.
There, teams will fight for a spot in the NLC Winter 2025 grand final against favourites Los Ratones.
The NLC Winter 2025 grand finals will take place in Nottingham on March 1st and 2nd, with an NLC/LEC watch party and Los Ratones meet-and-greets also on the 2nd.
Enough of what’s next for now – let’s look at how The Ruddy Sack, Bulldog and the community reacted to tonight’s result.
‘An insanely disappointing end to The Ruddy Sack Winter; we need to alter our approach at the very minimum’ – IWDominate
“We lost to Bulldog twice. They’re just a better team than us,” The Ruddy Sack co-owner IWDominate said on stream after tonight’s loss.
“We didn’t lose because of our drafts. We lost from winnable game states multiple times. Our team is not functioning together well.
“Any team that goes through something like this, there has to be changes. We have to change something.
“We tried to up the scrims – that obviously didn’t work. It’s not like we didn’t try here, you know? That’s the thing that that sucks.
“After the first week of NLC where we scrimmed, like one time, we’re like, we have to scrim more. We scrimmed four times a week, and then people committed to that. And our results in scrims were better.
“But when we played these officials, we just played really bad because we didn’t set up enough stuff. So something has to change. We’ll probably change players to some degree, to try to get people that wanna play, just so that it’ll be more fun. Because I don’t want the team to be like this.”
“I’m personally going to view the next split as a clean slate and take the lessons we learned from this Winter Split into Spring to create the best version of The Ruddy Sack.”
IWDominate, The Ruddy Sack
“When we had to change our roster, my realistic expectations for the team were third place,” IWD continued. “I don’t think we were competitive, or having fun, so we have to restructure things and try to make it a better experience.
“I just want to come back next split and be legitimate, you know? Not be a team that’s like a clown show. I want the team to be something fun. That’s what I think we’re doing.
“The attitude towards everything needs to change, or it’s just not worth doing. And I think it is worth doing, but what that means is that we need to alter our approach at the very minimum. Like, something has to change for sure.”
IWDominate also spoke about being happy to invest in the stream’s virtual studio, despite it being expensive, and that he doesn’t want to ‘give it up instantly’.
He also wrote a tweet with more thoughts, saying ‘it was fairly apparent that we simply thought that this would be easier than it actually was, which clearly led to our downfall’.
Humzh and Jankos open up on The Ruddy Sack team dynamic and NLC playoffs exit
ADC Humzh responded in clips like the below.
He said pro play is new to him and he’s adapting, and he doesn’t want to be more vocal on a team that already has a shot-caller like Jankos.
Humzh did also admit there were times where he got annnoyed in the scrims, but that he didn’t feel like he got flamed by his team when they were knocked out.
This led to The Ruddy Sack jungler Jankos commented on the situation.
He said he will probably stay on the project in the future too, following the Korea bootcamp, but the team probably won’t be the same.
“I just want five people to enjoy the process and do it because they want to be there, and to have fun doing it,” he said on stream. “Los Ratones are doing it right, they’re having fun, the numbers are just extra.
“I’d also be down for playing support.”
Jankos also said in a tweet that he was embarrassed by the team’s behaviour, with comms that were too ‘negative and passive aggressive’.
Update: DonJake joined Jankos’ stream to ‘fire’ him from The Ruddy Sack, saying ‘good luck in McDonald’s!’ before giving him a rallying pep talk ahead of the NLC Spring 2025 Season.
‘It’s difficult to lose in the ways that we have’ – DonJake
The Ruddy Sack co-owner DonJake also took to Twitch to share his thoughts following tonight’s loss.
He said that The Ruddy Sack had underperformed and that it is ‘difficult to adjust to the reality of underperforming or being worse than you thought’.
Bear with us with these quotes as we grabbed some of these live, without a vod available.
“You have to have people who are heavily committed,” DonJake said. “No one enjoys losing on this team, you have players with competitive legacies on the line.
“From Dom’s POV, it’s not fun to watch a team lose. I don’t enjoy us being this bad. I’ve built something that’s never finished lower than fourth, and now we are worse. Even if it’s a content team, it’s difficult to lose in the ways that we have.”
DonJake, The Ruddy Sack
Jake was in London for another The Ruddy Sack NLC watch party at the Red Bull Gaming Sphere this evening.
And he spoke highly of the Ruddy fans and community travelling to meet up for events like this.
He said that even when the team is losing, having fans being upset means something is being done correctly, and that he would rather have fans like this who care.
“We only feel so bad because we could’ve felt so good. That’s important to remember,” he said. “There is love that is occurring.”
The Ruddy Sack have received scrutiny, including this LoL reddit post about the loss, and this LoL reddit post about how the team work with ADC player Humzh.
Jankos defended Ruddy over this on his stream, saying: “I don’t think people should call out the team atmosphere without knowing about the team atmosphere.”
“We’re hated in a different way now, it’s been weird to adjust to the scrutiny,” DonJake added. “People see what Los Ratones do and what we do, and they’re negative.”
On potential changes, he said: “It’s a difficult process, we’ve just lost, no decisions [around changes] have been made just yet. But you can be promised in everything I’ve ever done, you’ll never see anything less than demanding we push forward. We push something unique and something to believe in. There will be haters outside with reasons not to believe in what we do. But I think we’ve pushed a really good brand, I think the rebrand [Ruddy’s Chief Creative Officer] Teddy Westside did was amazing.
“He did some good work this split and deserves to work at a tier 1 org, but I’m glad you’re settling to build something beautiful.”
Regardless, Jake admitted he felt that some of ‘the unique Ruddy flair’ was missing this split.
One of my clips of the evening@NotDonJake comparing @IWDominate investing in Ruddy to the Glazers' takeover of Man United???? pic.twitter.com/g2ykYoAiUT
— Dom Sacco | Powered by AGON by AOC for the NLC (@Dom_Sacco) February 20, 2025
“Dom [joining Ruddy as a co-owner] is like when the Glazers bought Man United!” he said.
“We went from Alex Ferguson with back-to-back Champions League to what Man United are like now! You actually ruined Rudchester United IWD, and you will fucking pay!
“[…]But things will be good in the future guys, seriously.”
Teddy later joined the stream, and Bulldog Nawi and Jolly joined the chat, and DonJake proceeded to call out Bulldog on the quality of their social content.
“We’re Sam Allardyce laughing at Jose Mourinho getting mad at anti-football route one. How could we ever be the bad guys?” Jolly responded.
On that note:
‘Ruddy DOWN’ – Bulldog celebrate after knocking The Ruddy Sack out of NLC Winter playoffs
While we’ve given lots of air time to The Ruddy Sack, given their exit with such big names involved is big news in UK LoL, we have to of course include comment from Bulldog, whose journey in the playoffs continue.
Bulldog co-owner and streamer NAWI – who joined as Bulldog Esports returned a few months ago – was excited as Bulldog clinched the win!
Bulldog top-laner Mietek said on the NLC broadcast after the win: “I don’t know what to say, to be honest! Crazy series.
“We had a game plan, behind the scenes we had a new addition to the coaching staff. After the fifth game we’re so happy, but after the second game… I think we’re a team that after a loss of a game like that, we take a break, take a breather and come back.
“I didn’t think I’d be playing against Jankos and Perkz. If someone had told me I would, I wouldn’t have believed them. I just wanted to win and give the best performance I could.”
Esports News UK understands the new strategic coach at Bulldog is Żuraw.
The players also took to Twitter with excitement:
The Ruddy Sack players haven’t reacted on Twitter yet, but were clearly disappointed with the loss on their streams. There also wasn’t a Ruddy press conference this evening.
Verdant will now play against Rich Gang next in the NLC Winter 2025 playoffs on February 20th 2025.
Dom is an award-winning writer and finalist of the Esports Journalist of the Year 2023 award. He graduated from Bournemouth University with a 2:1 degree in Multi-Media Journalism in 2007.
As a long-time gamer having first picked up the NES controller in the late ’80s, he has written for a range of publications including GamesTM, Nintendo Official Magazine, industry publication MCV and others. He worked as head of content for the British Esports Federation up until February 2021, when he stepped back to work full-time on Esports News UK and offer esports consultancy and freelance services. Note: Dom still produces the British Esports newsletter on a freelance basis, so our coverage of British Esports is always kept simple – usually just covering the occasional press release – because of this conflict of interest.
