[Lil' Lavery]

Not going to sift through 33 pages of responses on this issue, so apologies if this has been brought up before.

Do I agree with this change? No, I don't like it currently. My perception could change, and there have been plenty of other changes FIRST has implemented over the years that were met with varying degrees of negative reactions (alliances, districts, serpentine draft, etc) that are now staples of the FRC experience.

High school sports generally don't have widely recognized national champions. Even NCAA football has had split national champions, and only this year finally implemented a playoff system. While FRC obviously doesn't have the widespread appeal of those sports as cultural institutions at this point, I'm not convinced crowning a singular champion is essential to that. And it's not like the current system even does a particularly great job at having the "best" team win every year. The elite teams are aware of the amount of luck involved in the tournament. Match schedule, division placement, alliance selection, tournament match-ups and a slew of other factors have led to many of the consensus "best" individual teams being eliminated in Championship events over the years. The simple fact that it's an alliance-based tournament adds massive amount of uncertainty to the process of crowning the best teams.

I don't agree with this currently, but I'm not going to line up to throw tomatoes at FIRST just yet.