[Jon Stratis]

"For a 40 team region, you could garuantee 2 events for each team and do 3 events with 20 teams at each event."

The math doesn't add up here... 2 events per team for 40 teams means 80 spots. 3 events with 20 spots each is only a total of 60 spots.

Besides that nitpick, having only 20 teams would be very tough to do from a turn around perspective. you'll have 6 teams on the field, plus the next two matches queued (typically). That means 18 teams that are either in the match or in the queue. With that type of turn around, you would literally be asking teams to go straight from a match into the queue, with at most a couple of minutes in the pits. That eliminates almost any time a team would have to fix something that breaks.

We do 30 teams at our 1-day State Championship (occurs after Champs and is technically a "post-season" event), and even then it's pretty tough to manage the flow appropriately. While there weren't major issues this year, the previous year I know there were some issues with teams not having enough time between matches to swap their bumpers. We aren't even talking about repairs... just doing the absolute minimum to be able to put your robot on the field!

I certainly like the concept of trying to get more competitions and more plays in for those under-populated areas, but we need to make sure to look at timing and stress level for all of those involved. the faster the turn around time, the more stress people are going to have!