[tindleroot]

Recently I've been thinking about the waiver system - waivers and free picks have started to evolve into an "arms race" situation where the faster person gets great teams at no cost to themselves, certainly creating an unfair scenario for teams like RFA, FP, and TBC who all took advantage of the system. So I started looking at all of the reasons a team might want to swap:

1) A team they picked is no longer attending the event, so they opt to replace them.
2) A good team has recently signed up for the event.
3) One of their picks played very poorly at a previous event in the season.
4) An unpicked team played extremely well at a previous event in the season.
5) An picked team earned a lot of points at their first district event, making a high average.
6) One of their picks played poorly at their first district, lowering the average.

Given the reasons above, I think having a more-inclusive waiver system is in need for every case listed above except (1). If a team dropped an event, then the FF team gets first dibs at another team, regardless of waiver order or date (perhaps this should close by the start of the event?)
Otherwise, if anyone wants to swap a team for reasons 2-5, a waiver use should be required, and the team they want to swap needs to be posted publicly and have 1-2 days in which anyone else can take claim. As for districts, I actually support the 1-play swap idea, but in addition to waiver we should set a maximum on the number of district swaps allowed, perhaps around 3-5. This means that you have to judge swaps carefully, and you can't expect to get a lot of unexpectedly good teams, rather you have to put more thought into the original picks.

Another thought I had for the waiver system was to create an auction-based system. Give ever FF team x waiver points to start out with. If you wanted to claim a team, you would do so with an attached price, but someone else could out-claim you, even if you were ahead of them in the order. In this way, an FF team could either claim a few really good teams, or a lot of decent teams, or a mix of the two, making for a fairer waiver process.

On to another topic, inter-district plays.

This one is going to have to be a compromise in some way. If we count inter-district plays for points, then averages could be reduced since teams are ineligible for the legacy awards at those events. If we don't count them, then inter-district teams will have a higher average than most since they will have a practice event that doesn't count for points (just like FRC). I really want to lean towards counting those teams for points at all events, but something has to be put in place if this happens in order to account for awards.

Just some initial thoughts.