[Kevin Sevcik]

I partially agree with lucien here. It would be nice if we could guarantee an even distribution of talent between divisions, but this invites too much fallible human judgement into the process. Whether you have a spreadsheet or not, someone's going to be judging. In your current case, you're judging that rankings are foremost and later regional rankings even moreso. Many teams would disagree with this, and near 50% of our teams only attend one regional, which could put them at a disadvantage. Strength of regional is totally subjective, unless you base it on the W-L-T records of all the other teams at the regional, which turns into a horrible mess. You're basically running the risk of turning FIRST into the BCS. I applaud the idea of distributing talent, I'm just not certain it's possible to do so in an unbiased fashion. At the very least, several months of consideration should be given to the process and there shold be many factors that contribute to the rating.

I do agree that "number-neighbors" should get a chance to work together. My current plan for this is to implement a semi-randomized version of the current system. The current system (I believe) runs down the team list numbering teams 1, 2, 3, and 4, giving an even distribution of low and high numbered teams. My system would take the first 8 teams, and randomly assign two 1s, 2s, 3s, and 4s to the teams. This would give number neighbors a chance of working together, but keep the current distribution of low and high number teams.