[Jaci]

I guess I'll weigh in a bit.

Personally, I think the current way divisions are organised is just fine. Sure, this year we got extremely competitive divisions and some less competitive divisions, but that's just the nature of how these things work out.

From what I understand the current (or at least, 2014, judging by the earlier link to FIRST's own website) system for sorting for championships is done in a sort of round-robin style, first with rookies, then with veterans. In this way, it's very hard to introduce bias into the division split. The same would be true for generating division placements by random number. In both ways, there's no 'filter' applied to each division, making it seem like a fair and balanced way to distribute teams.

In the suggestion given by the OP, it seems like they're suggesting much the same system, but breaking it up to more categories than just "rookie/veteran", i.e. round-robin on pools of qualification level (winner, finalist, award, pre-qual, waitlist etc). This is all well and fine, in fact, from face value, it's better than the current system. However, don't stop reading here.

The main problem with ALL methods of distributing teams is that teams aren't individual, but play in alliances. The performance of the whole alliance depends on how each team within that alliance performs, and how they perform together. This is the reason I don't think splitting teams in this way will make a huge difference when looking at the bigger picture, because rankings all come down to alliance allocations in matches. For the sake of argument, let's say it does make a difference, and the (objectively) best teams end up ranked after each other in descending order. During alliance selections is really where things start to kick off. At the end of the day, no matter the distribution, Alliance selections will often follow the same kind of recipe: "Top Team / Top Team #2 / Middle Team / Last Team". When it comes to playoffs within the divisions, only one alliance can be victorious. This gets rid of that team-stacking distribution we saw this year on some divisions. I believe that this is the reason playoffs and alliance selections are the way they are. Now would be a good time to mention that all of this comes down to interpretation. As a final point, playoff matches are where the real competition starts, and qualification matches depend almost entirely on how the alliances are made up on the match schedule.

Through either distribution of teams, I theorize that the same teams would end up on Einstein either way, which is where the competition really amps up to another level.

Again, this is all just my interpretation of each distribution and how I *THINK* it would work out. Don't take it as gospel