Quote:
Originally Posted by GeeTwo
Agreed. If a "random" assignment is to be performed, it should be following qualification, not prior to competition. This would also allow team preference to be taken into account.
Strawman: At each cycle of qualification (e.g. weeks of regionals), the teams which qualify are given 24 hours to express a preference for one venue or the other. Those who do not express a preference are randomly assigned to keep the two events the same size. If too many teams express one or the other, all "no preference" teams go to the short event and teams will be randomly selected from those who selected the long event to go to the other.
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This could create its own problems, though, since some weeks are likely to be biased towards one location or another depending on the location of the week's events (i.e. Week 6 would be very Detroit-heavy due to MICMP being that week). You'd have to take that into account when assigning the 'no preference' teams.
I like the overall idea, since it avoids dividing FRC into two mostly mutually exclusive parts (as a geographic split likely would), but I agree with others that there would be some logistical challenges to overcome. That being said, I think this is worth looking into.