Quote:
Originally Posted by Lil' Lavery
My point was more regarding coupling capacity and team percentage. Others have addressed FIRST's stated reasoning (all students have a chance to attend in 4 year HS career).
|
I wasn't making a point about a particular percentage. You asked "why pick a percentage target?" and I answered that question from a practical standpoint. Of course the alternative is to pick a hard number, e.g., 600 which they've done, but that will represent a decreasing % of all of the teams.
All other sports that have faced a growing league size have expanded their playoffs. Think of baseball which use to just have the AL and NL pennant winners play. That's clearly no longer the case. The question now is how should the Champs be structured.
If someone is thinking that FIRST is going to drop its contracts with Detroit and Houston, that is a very long shot if FIRST wants to continue to be taken seriously in future negotiations with other cities. If you are thinking of a counter proposal I strongly urge you to either come up with a fully developed playoff system that includes more teams (e.g. Districts everywhere) or that uses the two-city model in some format that brings 400 teams to each city. There's no going back to the way it was.