A bottom-five team.

That’s where most people placed the Dallas Fuel before the third season of the Overwatch League, Fuel tank star Lucas “NotE” Meissner told The Dallas Morning News on Jan. 29.

He didn’t say it with frustration or confusion, though. He was calm and thoughtful on the matter, but most of all, confident.

“They do that because that's what history tells us,” NotE said. “History tells us that the Fuel are going to, at some point in time, crash and burn. But I don't think that's going to happen this season. There will be a lot of bad teams, but we definitely aren’t going to be one of them.”

The Fuel, who face the San Francisco Shock at 10 p.m. Friday, recently proved that they can throttle bottom-five teams. The Washington Justice had no chance when the Fuel swept them lat Saturday. It was a culmination of everything the Fuel set out to achieve at the start of the season. They wanted to effectively communicate with a roster that spoke both English and Korean, mesh new faces with familiar ones and shed the notion that the Fuel weren’t a team to be afraid of by having their own flavor.

Two straight wins, as impressive as they may have been by playing compositions against the meta and coming out on top, won’t make the Fuel elite. They have to defeat the best of the best.

They have a chance to do that on Friday at 10 p.m. against the reigning OWL champions.

“If we can take a win over Shock, I think it definitely helps sway opinion,” Fuel head coach Aaron “Aero” Atkins said Thursday. “In my opinion, Shock are still the best or second best based on scrims we’ve had against them in the past, knowing their coaches and players. They are all fantastic and anyone who can take a win off them deserves to be talked about as a good team.”

The Fuel and Shock already met this season -- San Francisco came out on top in a 3-1 match on Feb. 9 -- but so much has changed about OWL play since then. It’s effectively a different game.

Hero pools were introduced, so teams couldn’t refine their gameplay and there composition over the course of several months. They now have one week to put together a strategy good enough to win that avoids using four banned heroes; Reinhardt, Widowmaker, McCree and Brigitte are unavailable this week.

Teams took on different processes of combating hero pools. The Shock lost a pair of matches to the two Los Angeles teams because they didn’t prepare correctly, Shock support star Grant “Moth” Espe said. They paid for it.

“We had a really bad read on the meta and we had been practicing a composition and ended up being the only team that played it during match day,” Moth said. “You only get four or five days to scrim and prepare and we had a bad read and practiced something we thought was the meta and it wasn’t, so it fell through on match day when it turned out to not be a good comp and it was all we had been practicing.”

The Shock adjusted since then, allowing themselves to explore more to find more sustainable strategies with some backup plans. Moth and the Shock were rewarded promptly by defeating the same team handily a week removed from their initial matchups.

That still differed from what the Fuel have done. They’ve shown no regard for a meta composition, despite going in knowing what it might be. Dallas ran their damage dealers, Jang “Decay” Gui-un and Kim “DoHa” Dongha, on Tracer, Doomfist, Genji and even Pharah. The Justice couldn’t stop the bleeding against the Fuel’s damage line.

While the Fuel were questioned for their picks a few weeks ago when they displayed it against the Gladiators and Valiant, it’s become evident that difference was a strength.

“It is funny, being a team that everyone counts as an underdog or doesn’t expect a ton from, and then pulling off wins with stuff that people don’t expect,” Aero said. "It’s a showing of how we decided to play and a philosophy thing. Let’s play what we are strong at and not care what the meta is. We always try to learn the meta in the time we have, but we want to have our style and do our thing with it. It’s pretty cool to see that kind of thing.”

The Shock will not treat the Fuel as a bottom-five team, Moth said. He added that not only are the Fuel better than they were at the start of the season, they are better than they were all of last season, too.

“They are not a team we can take lightly,” Moth said. “They are not the same team as last year or the year before. They have a really strong roster now, so we have to put everything into the match like we would against any other team.”

The Fuel may have less to lose if they were to fall to the Shock. San Francisco remains the projected favorite in the match and the Fuel still have something to prove, but this match could still be a symbol of growth. Both teams were confident in themselves going into the match. One of them has a trophy and experience to back it up, and the other has a style they’ve created and are attached to.

“Last year people were down and sad but now we all just want to prove to everyone that we aren’t this garbage team,” Fuel tank player Ash “Trill” Powell said. “We are the underdogs for sure, but we want to prove we are better.”

On Friday, the Fuel can.

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