I've lost the earlier thread (I think started by Boltman) about match scheduling at Central Valley Regional. I suggested that there is a better way to schedule those matches so as that we don't have oddities where the best teams (yes, there is sorting of abilities in FRC) don't play each other or end up in alliances together during qualifications. We saw the same thing happen at Silicon Valley this year. 1678, 254, 971 and 368 never played each other and 1678 was allied with all 3 others. 3 teams were unbeaten and 368 could have been unbeaten as well.
It turns out that the
NFL goes through substantial schedule permutations to arrive at equitable constrained schedules for the season. (Baseball, basketball and hockey don't have this problem because each team plays the others multiple times.)
Let's not confuse "arbitrary" with "random." Random doesn't guarantee fair, especially if we don't have multiple draws. Playing 1-3 events each season doesn't guarantee that everyone will have an equitable chance. (And BTW, the current method is not truly "random" because it requires a seed value to get it started. This has long been an issue in statistical analysis.) The situation requires intervention to arrive at a fair schedule. No scheduling method will be perfect, but most efforts will be better than the arbitrary method used now.