[Paul Copioli]

Dave, you asked for it. Here comes radical: The requirement for my idea is that there must be an even number of qualifying rounds (6, 8, 10, or 12). Have an offense and a defense, much like football. In the qualifying rounds, you play half of your matches on defense and half of your matches on offense. Your qualifying ranking could be based on a few different methods:

1. Points allowed vs. points scored. Take your points scored * X - points allowed *Y + B. X and Y could both be 1 (I see lots of negative scores) or you could bias a little toward points scored or you could shift the score using B as an adder.

2. You could have a defensive ranking and an offensive ranking combining them to have an overall ranking. Let's say there are 40 teams in your regional and you are 40th in defense and 1st in offense you would get 1 point for being 40th and 40 points for being 1st giving you an average of 20.5. Teams would then be ranked by the combined points. Encourages well roundedness.

3. You could keep the offensive ranking and defensive ranking separate and have the top 4 offenses pick and the top 4 defenses pick during alliance selection (I don't really like that one).

The elimination rounds are where it gets interesting. There would be a minimum of 3 teams per alliance, but 4 would be preferred. You play 4 periods: 2 on offense and 2 on defense. You add up the points you get on offense in each half and that is your score. This focuses the game on one team scoring at a time, not both teams trying to score at opposite ends at the same time. If the score is tied, then we go to overtime and each team gets another crack at offense.

This would really mix up the tournament format. You want radical ... you can't handle radical!

-Paul