Posted by Jerry Eckert, Engineer on team #140 from Tyngsboro, MA High School and New England Prototype/Brooks Automation.
Posted on 3/21/99 5:32 PM MST
In Reply to: Re: Possible Rule change for Flordia? (Please) and the reason for more seeding rounds. posted by Jay Booth on 3/21/99 3:25 PM MST:
: I agree that if at all possible we should have more seeding rounds for all the reasons here and those in the giagantic thread I didn't even finish about the issue. However, FIRST seems to be under the impression we'll have too many teams and not enough time. I'm sure by this point it is really hard to reschedule to competition to allow for more time. So my solution is instead of putting the top 8 into the finals with a pick, have an extra round of finals and put the top 16 in with their draft choice. It uses significantly less time than giving each team another 4 qualifying rounds and makes the better teams much more represented. With 16 teams picking, many teams that were put in bad situations like the one you described, yet still showed that they had an excellent robot, will be picked. Hopefully. Anyhow that's my 2 cents worth.
Hi Jay! Long time, no see...
If I remember correctly, there are going to be approximately 200 teams participating at
Disney. Allowing 16 more teams into the finals won't be of any benefit to the vast
majority of the participants.
The best idea I've seen so far (which happens to be one I also thought of while at Hartford
this weekend) is to overlap matches with scoring of the previous match. I think a very
conservative estimate is that you could have 50% more qualifying matches without changing the
competition schedule.
- Jerry