Wednesday morning and - apparently - no word from FIRST yet.
What are the chances of the regionals that start tomorrow using these interpretations as their own?
Another, perhaps better question: Are we overthinking this?
As Dean has said before, he doesn't want to get to a point where you need to be a lawyer to understand the rules. I think this is a negative aspect of that goal. The rule is simple and has worked well for years, but it seems that no one thought of ensuring that the letter of the rule matched its implementation.
The easiest solution is to get rid of the lawyer mindset. If I were handling the situation, I'd modify the rule to reflect the alliance selection process that was used in the past few seasons and, perhaps, apologize for what happened at VCU and Peachtree.
Until something like that happens, though, we've got the next week of regionals to worry about. I've got no idea what regionals are running - USFIRST.org is down again - but I can easily see one of the less established regionals using this version of the alliance process as a precedent. It shouldn't happen at Great Lakes, but who's to say that it won't happen at...say, the Boilermaker Regional?
In the end, though, I think this just proves that FIRST is run by humans. We create something, we screw it up, and then we get to deal with the outcomes we've created.
