To Defeat the Falcons, You Must Outsmart Coach Moody 

When Mohammad Samal aka Coach Moody arrived at Team Falcons from Team Liquid at almost the end of MPL Philippines Season 16, the team was already drifting. The losses had accumulated. The Falcons looked like veterans who lost the rhythm of their own game. 

Every team eventually reaches that point: when mechanics are not enough and talent cannot explain why things are falling apart. Team Falcons was on a 6-week losing streak in Season 16.

Then Moody entered in Week 7.

And somehow, Falcons began breathing again.

The drafts sharpened. The players regained confidence. Their movements began carrying intention again. 

I remember asking Moody last season about what he did to revitalize the team, some of whom are even two-time world champions. 

“I just reminded them who they are,” he said. 

Duckey: If I’m the Dad, then Moody is the Mom

By the time Season 17 arrived, Falcons no longer looked like a team trying to survive. They looked like a team thinking several moves ahead of everyone else.

And they broke the winning streak of Team Liquid Philippines. In Philippine esports, it takes a titan to slay another god. In the words of Team Liquid’s Coach Aeon, Team Falcons simply outdrafted them.

Coach Duckey describes Moody in the simplest way possible. “He’s a great tactical coach,” said Duckey. 

But when it comes to coach dynamics, Duckey boils it down to parenthood: 

“If I’m the dad, then Moody is the mom.”

The comparison sounds funny at first, until Duckey explains what he means. “If I say, Moody, this is what we need to do or this is the direction we want to go, he devises a way how we can go to that certain point.”

“If you’re the disciplinarian, then Moody is the ilaw ng tahanan?” we asked. “He lights up the way?”

Duckey agreed. 

“Yeah, he lights up the way.” 

Strategic intelligence often hides itself inside calmness. It already sees the shape of the game unfolding before everybody else does. That’s Moody. 

Moody is Team Falcons’ Architect of Possibility

Duckey calls Moody one of the few tactical coaches he genuinely respects. “His game IQ is very high, comparable to the best coaches in the MLBB scene.”

Inside Falcons, Moody became the architect of possibility.

But what makes his rise compelling is that he did not arrive carrying the prestige people usually associate with authority. He came from MDL. Younger. Less decorated. Surrounded by veterans whose names already carried history before he even entered the room.

And yet he earned their trust anyway.

Perhaps because players recognize sincerity faster than people think.

“For me, noong bagong pasok pa lang si Coach Moody, alam ko na talagang matalinong tao siya,” says Exp Laner David Charles Canon, aka Flap. “Ginagawa niya yung best niya para maibalik yung confidence namin, at nagawa niya iyon.”

Confidence is a strange thing in professional esports. Analysts often discuss it like momentum or statistics, something measurable through results. But confidence is emotional architecture. It is built through repetition, through trust, through somebody convincing you that your instincts are still worth listening to after failure has already begun eating at you.

That was Moody’s handiwork.

Not teaching veterans how to play. They already knew how.

Instead, he taught them how to trust themselves again.

“One of my principles as a coach is teach a team how to work together,” Moody says. “The misconception about coaches is people think coaches are there to teach players how to play. But these are veteran players, they are way past that. It’s more of how they handle their emotions and responsibilities.”

That answer explains almost everything about Falcons now.

‘Awrado Ako Sayo.’ Coach Moody Was Intimidated By Coach Duckey. 

Most people watching esports only see drafts. Hero pools. Macro rotations. Counter-picks. But the deeper game has always been psychological. The best teams are not simply the most skilled. They are the teams whose emotions remain organized under pressure.

Moody understands this instinctively.

Before esports, he worked in a call center, managing people instead of players. Leadership, at its core, remains the same no matter the environment. He remembered the days when he was managing agents. 

“As a leader, I didn’t want the agents to see me as a threat,” he says. “I would rather they see me as someone they could lean on and guide them. It’s the same principle in esports,” Moody told ALL-STAR. 

But there was a time when Moody himself, in his own words, was “awrado” by Duckey. 

Duckey remembers how intimidated Moody once was around him.

During a team-building bonfire, Moody admitted he was “awrado” because of Duckey’s accomplishments. But Duckey told him something simple: stop looking at accolades. Believe in what you already have.

That conversation changed Falcons too.

Coach Moody is one of MPL’s Most Dangerous Men

The current version of Team Falcons feels built on exactly that principle: trust in each other’s intelligence.

Mitch Liwanag, Team Liquid’s head of esports, saw it early. She was the first MPL team executive to discover the talents of Coach Moody. Before MPL. Before the headlines. Back when Moody was still grinding in MDL.

“I already saw leadership potential in him,” she says. “Whenever he drafts, he is always able to explain and express it properly to the players.”

That detail matters more than people realize.

A strategist is not merely somebody who understands the game. A strategist is somebody who can translate vision into belief. 

And if what sources say is true, Moody is one of the most dangerous men in MPL Philippines. 

What makes Moody dangerous is not that he knows one answer. It is that he seems to have already prepared for five different versions of the same problem. 

Duckey called his game IQ “very high,” and there is something almost unnerving about the way that praise keeps returning from different mouths, each one arriving from a slightly different angle, all pointing to the same truth: Moody does not merely coach the game. He reads it. 

And to defeat Falcons now, you cannot simply outplay them. You have to outthink the mind that organized them. You have to solve the problem of Coach Moody, one careful layer at a time. 

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