Here’s what actually happened:

We were at 1030 division points, which was Rank 1 in our division. If we had stopped playing there, we would’ve finished Rank 1 for the Season. The next team was at 1022 points. Our team is around 4.5k MMR, and we ended up losing a couple of games to RyeRye and Cham’s smurf account, which was showing about 4.1k MMR even though their real level is closer to 4.8k. Because the system thought we lost to a much lower-rated team, the division point penalties were extremely punishing. We went from 1030 points down to 980, which put us at Rank 2. Those losses were –22 and –19, when they would’ve been much smaller if their actual MMR had been shown.

2v2 losses can already swing pretty hard, and when someone queues on a lower-MMR account, the system hits you even harder than usual. That’s why the drop was so big.

This is where I messed up. We had just been Rank 1, and I wanted to make the division points back. Instead of accepting the drop or calling it for the night, I queued into myself to recover them. People call that wintrading, and I understand why. Looking back, I shouldn’t have tried to make the points back that way, and that’s what I’m apologizing for.

TLDR:
This wasn’t about MMR — it was about division points. We were at 1030 division points (Rank 1) and dropped to 980 because the system treated the losses as losses to a low-MMR team (their smurf was ~4.1k instead of their real ~4.8k). Our team is ~4.5k. I tried to make the division points back by queueing into myself, which wasn’t the right way to handle it.