In a recent interview with Malcolm Gladwell, the author Michael Lewis said that “Sports is such a wonderful laboratory just because it’s so clean in so many ways.” I feel the same about BattleBots but for the opposite reason. The human element of a sport like basketball is obvious but the polished internal architecture of the game is what fascinates many of its most devoted fans. With BattleBots, the engineering is what takes center stage, and only when you dig beneath that metal exoskeleton do you discover the gritty humanity at the core of the sport. These machines are engineered with an immaculate precision that goes all the way out the window as soon as a match starts, so it really isn’t the clean wiring of the bot that makes it successful so much as the dirty wiring of its driver. No driver embodies this ugly survivorship better than Hal Rucker, the builder and driver of Duck!

By all accounts, Duck! isn’t a particularly good bot. It’s weapon is a lifting wedge that lacks both hydraulic intensity and defensive utility. Its armor is virtually non-existent and the bot is basically a DVD player with a beak. Duck! should never win. And yet, Hal Rucker’s misfit fowl is 5-2 in its career with its only losses coming to the historically dominant Tombstone and the prolific launcher of Bronco. In the fourth episode of this current season, Duck! was getting ragdolled by Cobalt, a robust bot with a front wedge and a violent vertical spinner. For the first two full minutes of the fight, Cobalt was not only taking Duck! to the woodshed, it was burning down the woodshed with Duck! inside it. Duck! had lost its beak, the massacre was on. And then...Cobalt got stuck on the floor of the battle box and couldn’t move. And if you can’t move, you can’t fight. The match was ruled a knockout in favor of Duck! Rucker openly acknowledged his bot didn’t deserve to win. He was wrong. Heart is a skill. In that moment, and throughout its career, Duck! has been much like Tim Tebow during his improbable playoff run with Denver in the 2011 season. Casual observers could look at Tebow’s stats and at his play and easily recognize that this man was not cut out to win at the NFL level. He was so bad at throwing and he was even worse at reading defenses. Somehow, he won games anyway. It made less and less sense as time went on and the wins accumulated. Chuck Klosterman wrote about the Tebow experience and he included a passage that applies perfectly to the Duck! Destruction Tour as well:

“The machinations of his success don’t matter as long as they’re inexplicable...It’s the ongoing choice between embracing a warm feeling that makes no sense or a cold pragmatism that’s probably true…[B]ut Tebow wrecks all that, because he makes blind faith a viable option.”

The success of Duck! signals a welcome return to what originally made BattleBots so wacky and enjoyable. Like Duck!, the current incarnation of BattleBots doesn’t seem to care about why it’s succeeding or the ultimate degree to which it does succeed as long as it enjoys the ride.

Viewership for the show has dropped below a million fans per episode in the last two seasons after routinely drawing an average of 1.5 million per episode in early seasons and generally between 3 and 5 million per episode in 2015 and 2016. While the 2016 finale alone drew 5.61 million, the most viewed episode this season pulled in just 997,000. It’s worth noting that these depressed numbers are perhaps primarily attributable to the show’s transition from network television to more niche locations on the dial. Each of ABC’s current most viewed summer shows draw in larger audiences than any current season episodes of BattleBots while still drawing fewer than Bots did back when it ran on ABC. Among the shows are Reef Break, Child Support, Indigo Point, and 1969. One of those is a show I just made up. Despite the reduced audience relative to ABC, Discovery and Science have been thrilled with the viewership of Bots and it ranks among their most popular shows. These channels provide a better home for Bots than ABC ever could anyway.

In the opinion of Trey Roski, an original co-founder of Bots, “Discovery is the TV network where BattleBots has always belonged.” Discovery doesn’t have the cash or the draw of ABC but it has something else: an audience smarter than the general public that is legitimately interested in nuanced, nerdy programming. “This is a sport for smart people,” adds Roski, echoing Liebling, “it’s the place to show off your imagination, your engineering prowess, and art.” Imagination is not something you’ll often find on ABC, and nor for that matter are engineering prowess or art.

During Bots’ original run on Comedy Central in the early 2000s, its creators worried that the network built on jokes would turn their passion project into a joke as well. Though the show rated well on the strength of huge initial interest from a previously unengaged demographic, too many gimmicks crept in to retain these newcomers. The show included zany sketches between fights and adorned the broadcast with Super Hot Babes™ that made BattleBots less an expression of engineering passion than a copycat sideshow targeting mainstream sports fans. “The skits and the scantily clad women turned off a lot of the people who watched the show for the robots,” said Brett Dawson, builder of the bot “Mobius.” Such corporatization and homogenization was temporarily good for business but it wasn’t good for the sport itself.

“In the last season or two [on Comedy Central], it became less of a sport and more of an entertainment vehicle,” agreed Greg Munson, one of the other Bots co-founders along with Roski. On Discovery and Science, there is no longer a mandate to turn BattleBots into something it isn’t, and while there’s no overt comedy quota, the show remains quite funny. The difference now is that the silliness is not derived from staged gags but rather from how seriously the stakeholders take the competition. BattleBots essentially asks highly skilled engineers to spend hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars building weaponized Roombas to capture “The Giant Nut.” That premise is funny enough on its own. Adding sketches only puts a hat on a hat.