From Frank's FRC Blog:
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I’m personally very interested in hearing your ideas about how we may be able to arrange for final matches between the winners of FIRST Championship Houston and FIRST Championship St. Louis.
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What are your suggestions?
Here's mine. I'm definitely borrowing from ideas I've seen floated here in the past.
- Fly 16 teams someplace to arrive by Friday night
- Invite the 4 winners from each city, plus top 2 bots from each finalist alliance, plus captains from semifinalist alliances (or some such system)
- Play 16 or so qualifier matches Saturday morning
- Alliance selections before lunch
- Semis and Finals in the afternoon to find a winning alliance.
This would be small enough that FIRST could get a small venue and send the lucky qualifying teams for free. Bring the best camera crew and announcers and produce it like a professional sporting event.
16 matches is enough to give every team 12 partners, and you could even balance the schedule such that you get more partners from your opposite city's championship to mix it up.
The point would be to bring a really great set of robots together to have it out for a Championship that can be reasonably completed in a single day. It would be able to produce some super alliances that are nearly impossible to create with a normal serpentine draft.
Something like this has a small enough number of teams that you could more easily hype it up for a broader audience to understand. It would make a really cool TV special that you could easily condense down to an hour or two of screen time. I can picture some team introductions and bio and game explanations and history to start the program (previous match footage and stories mixed in), then qualifiers with commentary to provide context for the matches. The alliance selection would have some great drama and intrigue, so the commentary would need to explain that and drum it up. Then you have your two rounds of playoffs to determine a true World Champion Alliance. Maybe do best of five in the finals.
All of this is doable. When you're only talking about 16 teams and focusing it as a live web event to be turned into a TV special later, it's possible to come up with the funding to get that limited number of teams there. And the level of prestige at such an exclusive event is going to alleviate some of the burnout associated with holding the extra event beyond the regular championships. I doubt the invited teams would complain.