The Flaw in Matchmaking
Let me teach you a thing about MMR.
So, let's take this for example. My focus is on the MMR for each team, here.
When the game builds the teams to square off, they try to make the teams close to equal. The algorithm is, whoever has the highest MMR - even if it's by a SINGLE POINT - will get placed on red side. Okay? So, you'd think "Alright, the game individually picks players based on their MMR, and matches them all together in a team so they can function as one cohesive unit."
And you'd be fair for assuming that, but you'd be a stupid son of a bitch in the algorithm's eyes.
No, what it does is they take LITERALLY ANYBODY FROM ANY MMR and they match them with LITERALLY ANYBODY ELSE, and as long as the numbers add up in the end? Boom, there you go, there's your game. So you could realistically have one Master tier player, paired up with 4 unranked-bronze players, vs a team of varied gold-platinums. Obviously that's fucking unfair as shit for the Master tier player, because the rest of his team is just gonna eat absolute balls for the entire game because they don't have anywhere close to the actual game knowledge the entire enemy team has. But then you look at the numbers, right? And because the 4 bronze players have a Master tier player, their team MMR is actually a few numbers higher than the gold-plat mixup, so they get placed red side. They had the advantage.
The matchmaking is a fucking embarrassment.
(Also, for the record, I did win that game by a missed skillshot from one team leading to an ace on the other. But that isn't the focus, here. Nor is the focus that it's a Normals game, where the ranks don't matter - MMR still exists for normal games, that's why you don't see sub-30 players tossed in to the mix. Just because Ranked has a more strict ruleset for matchmaking, doesn't mean that it can't and won't stretch it as thin as it can.)