[gblake]

Without formally polling them, I am confident that "my" team (1885 at VCU) as a whole strongly dislikes the current approach to assigning teams to matches.

When I had to set-up match pairings recent for a Potomac Vex League scrimmage, I sweated my way through this subject for one long night and came up with a handcrafted schedule that spread things out evenly in time; and ensured that over 6 rounds, no team ever faced the same pair of opponents and never had the same ally. Once I did this for my 20 hypothetical teams, I randomly assigned the 20 real team numbers to the hyothetical teams and was done.

It was tedious to do this for the twenty teams coming to that scrimmage, and out of ignorance I probably made the job harder than it needed to be, but (here comes the punch line of this part of this message) I absolutely know that I could automate the process; and that it will not be all that hard to generalize and automate my process (or a better one).

So.... By the time we get to the Las Vegas Regional, I certainly hope that this week's experiment is in the dustbin of history. I hope that FIRST chooses to go back to something that is blind to any prejudices about team age or ability needing to be factored into the scheduling method.

I say this because I am willing to trust that over a 6 to 8 match set of regional qualifying rounds a regoinal's participants can get an accurate-enough assessment of team abilities to be confident that the highly seeded teams are generally where they should be and that all the teams have generally gotten an adequate opportunity to strut their stuff.

Blake
PS: Perhaps the story within the story here is this question... Should the match scheduling algorithm (described in layman's terms) be part of the published rules, so that we can all point out that discontent is high before the season's matches start?