fRoD on MIBR's mistakes during Kickoff: "Our fault for not adapting and not taking a few more risks"

Less than two weeks ago, MIBR squandered three opportunities to qualify for VALORANT Champions Tour 2026 - Masters Santiago 2026 in three consecutive days. Now, MIBR is ready to move forward, but that all starts by addressing some of the issues that plagued the team during VALORANT Champions Tour 2026 - Americas Kickoff.

That's precisely how MIBR's head coach Danny "fRoD" Montaner explained things during an exclusive interview with THESPIKE Brazil after pointing out the team's inability to adapt when they needed it. The way fRoD sees it, despite MIBR's limited prep time due to the consecutive nature of their three final series, the team still could have done "more."

“A lot of things happened, but it’s also very much our fault for not adapting and not taking a few more risks, I think. But at the same time, like I said, it was a little difficult to take that risk when we only started practicing in January. We didn’t have much time."

Looking Ahead

After pairing up two of the finest shooters in the Americas in Erick "aspas" Santos and Zachary "zekken" Patrone to start their 2026 season, MIBR's journey through Kickoff was nothing short of heartbreaking. And yet, fRoD is not too worried about the future. In fact, the coach argues that the team has already identified what it is they need to work on.

"We tried to find that balance within the reality of our team, which started the tournament with much less time than ideal. But we also failed in not trying to take a bit more risk, because I think we’re very aware of our mistakes and the things we need to do, but we ended up in a situation where we lacked practice. It’s hard to look for solutions when you have so many things to prepare.”

With little time for prep work as well as to develop synergy within a brand new roster, MIBR's start to the year turned out to be rather bumpy. Now, however, it's time to "find solutions."

"There were many things that happened before and during the matches, on the server, that made things even harder for our team. Personal matters, which I won’t go into detail about, but also things we did as a team. And we fell short as a team in that area as well. In reality, it was also very exhausting. We didn’t have much time to rest and prepare for the games. We did our best to try to do that and always look for solutions as a team. But it became very difficult. As I said, we’re very aware of the things we did wrong and we need to find solutions.”

Once the team failed to qualify for Masters Santiago, a large part of the community became critical of the Agent compositions MIBR opted to use in some of their maps during Kickoff. For fRoD, much of this criticism was quite valid, but he made it clear nonetheless that this was only one of several mistakes the team made throughout the tournament.

“I respect that opinion and, for sure, there’s a lot of truth to it; I agree. I think last year’s Champions showed very clearly what DRX and many teams were doing, which was very strong. It certainly would have helped our team to change those compositions and do many things differently, like I said, to take those risks. But at the same time, we lost the game — and while different compositions would have helped a lot, we made a lot of fundamental, basic mistakes in the game. I think with any composition, if we make the same mistakes, we’re going to lose. So yes, team compositions helps a lot, I agree with that, and we’re going to do many things differently. But we really don’t feel like we lost that game because of a composition. It was more about coming into the game cold, making many basic mistakes, having very low communication, very low energy. There were many factors that weighed heavily, and composition was one of them — but not the most important.”

You can find the complete video interview in the original Portuguese below:

fRoD and the rest of MIBR will not take to the stage for an official match again until the start of the VALORANT Champions Tour 2026 - Americas Stage 1. To show up in shape, however, MIBR will return to practice this Monday (February 23), giving them over a month of prep time before Stage 1. For a squad of this caliber, expectations will no doubt by sky-high.

For all things VCT-related, make sure to stay tuned to THESPIKE.GG as we continue to update you with the freshest game and esports news.

Featured image source: Colin Young-Wolff/Riot Games