Quote:
Originally Posted by RoboPhantom
Don't get me wrong... I think extra matches are great. I'm just wondering if it's normal for 4 complete matches containing nothing but "surrogates" is a normal occurance at a FIRST regional. Also wondering if the teams (and the spectators) knew or should have known that these were basically practice rounds and nobody had anything to gain or lose in the last 4 matches.
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Sorry, I didn't realize that everyone was a surrogate in those matches, but I just
checked, and sure enough, 24 teams played nine matches, while the other 21 played eight. To play eight times, the required number of matches is 60, with no surrogates. (Check my reasoning: if you have 45 teams, and 8 matches each, that makes 360 instances of a team taking the field; since 6 teams play each match, that's 60 matches, and since that's a whole number, no surrogates are needed.) That's idiotic—it's got to be a bug.
Quote:
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Originally Posted by Section 9.3.2
All teams will play the same number of qualifying matches except if the number of teams in attendance is not divisible by six; in that case the scoring system will randomly select some teams to play an extra match. For purposes of seeding calculations, those teams will be designated as SURROGATES for the extra match.
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Now here's what seems a little odd: the rule is based on the number of teams in attendance being divisible by 6. Since 45 ÷ 6 = 7.5, the rules call for surrogates and therefore extra matches, even if it is
already possible to construct a 60-match schedule in which everyone plays eight times. How many surrogates do you need to make a (60 +
n)-match schedule work? 6
n. So why is
n = 4? (64 matches were played.) Doesn't
n = 1 work also? (Six teams play in their 9
th match, not necessarily together, and the rule requiring surrogates is satisfied.) And if they did play together, that's proof that the match is extraneous.
Whatever our qualms about the reasoning behind the match-generating algorithm, this looks like a bug, and needs to be fixed, whether or not FIRST decides to re-work the methodology of choosing which teams play one another.