[Kevin Leonard]

Originally Posted by Paul Richardson

Currently the wildcard system rewards playing late regionals over early regionals. "Burned" wildcards could be reallocated to alleviate this.

If a team generates a wildcard that goes unused, retroactively create a wildcard at the earliest event where that team qualified for Championship and generated the least wildcards.

Spoiler for Hypothetical Scenarios:

Hypothetical Team A

Event 1: Regional Winner
Event 2: Regional Winner (wildcard used immediately)
Event 3: Regional Winner (wildcard unused)

A realistic scenario. Here the wildcard from Event 3 goes to Event 1, because Team A generated the least wildcards at Event 1.

Hypothetical Pre-qualified Team B

Event 1: Regional Winner and Regional Chairman's Award (2 wildcards used immediately)
Event 2: Regional Winner (wildcard unused)
Event 3: No awards
Event 4: Regional Winner (wildcard used immediately)
Event 5: Regional Winner (wildcard unused)

An unrealistic scenario for demonstration. Here the wildcard from Event 2 goes to Event 1, because Events 3-5 don't exist at that time. The wildcard from Event 5 goes to Event 4 because Event 4 has 1 wildcard from this team compared to 3 at Event 1. Event 2 also has only 1 wildcard, but is ignored because a wildcard already went unused at that event. Event 3 is ignored because Team B did not qualify there.

I think this is the biggest thing that is fixed with the new wildcards being alotted to each regional. Early regionals will now have at least one wildcard, and later regionals that already had a lot of wildcards aren't getting any more.