Red_THe problem with NA as it seems is we really don't have anything other than riflers. We have yet to create a world class IGL. Skadoodle is fine as far as awping goes but he's only one dude and he's special on the world scene.
Teams can completely get dragged through games with a worse individual skill than the opponent. The NA scene has decent riflers I think (shroud, tarik, freaks is ok, nothings alright, swag, nitro etc) but there really isn't too much surrounding that. If NA were to produce a good IGL I think we really could go somewhere with skadoodle on a team with them.
For example Happy from the old LDLC squad with Apex, kqly, uzi, and maniac was not incredibly skilled individually. However with Happy's fantastic IGL skills and solid rifle play, he continued to drag his lower skilled team through many tournaments to top4s and a final or two (I think
tl;dr NA needs a good IGL to actually compete against good teams
A good IGL would definitely help.
Unfortunately, trying to fix NA problems is like peeling back layer after layer of an onion made out of shit. First of all, the fact that IGLs (and good support players) are very rare is itself symptomatic of the fact that NA has an obsession with raw skill and getting as many sick aimers on teams as possible, as well as constantly cutting anyone who isn't getting lots of frags. Those types of players get really de-emphasized.
Unfortunately, that's just the tip of the iceberg. Let's look at the best ibp lineup that actually got to go to EU.
You have:
Dazed- the only really good NA IGL arguably.
Skadoodle- ditto for awping
Steel and AZK- ditto for support players, or at least 2 of the very few.
Swag- one of the best individual NA players.
Even that team was only able to make 1 EU finals ever. Wanna know why? It wasn't lack of skill. It's the ridiculously dumb practice conditions in NA. And I don't mean some whiny excuse about how bad the other teams are. I'm talking about scrim culture. EVERY team in NA does not take scrims nearly seriously enough, and from my experience, the teams that don't get their shit perfectly down in scrims are the ones who majorly tilt the second something goes wrong in the real LAN game.