Quote:
Originally Posted by IndySam
I am glad they changed the rule and made it the third match.
A few years ago we were in a final match with a surrogate that had been preforming very well during the competition. In pre-match strategy discussions they came up and told us they were going to try something new. No matter how hard our drivers tried to convince them otherwise, they didn't care, the match meant nothing to them. Of course their new stuff failed and we lost the match. We were very unhappy.
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Good observation. This was just the sort of situation that drove the new structure for the surrogate matches. There were too many teams that were not playing their surrogate matches in the same manner and with the same intensity as their other matches. This seemed to be exacerbated by having the surrogate match as the last match of the schedule, when some teams thought they could "lighten up" their style of play without any adverse effects. Having the surrogate match last in the schedule allowed a team to have full knowledge of how they and other teams were performing, and how playing at full intensity (or not) would affect the other teams in the match.
In the very worst case, having the surrogate matches as the last match in the schedule provided the opportunity to play some pretty ugly tactics. Consider the case of team that was assigned to a surrogate match with alliance partners that were ranked higher than them in the standings. Knowing that the match would not count for (or against) them, they would look instead at how the match would affect the standings of their alliance partners and opponents. They could find themselves in the position where if they intentionally "threw" the match and lost, it would cause their alliance partners to drop in the standings, but they would not. In particular cases, this could bump them up high enough to be in the top eight slots, and suddenly become a picking team during alliance selections. The potential for that sort of disingenuous play was to be avoided.
I am not saying that there are any teams that were actually observed doing this (unfortunately, I am also not saying that there were not). But just the potential for a scenario like this to happen was enough to force reconsideration of how the surrogate matches were assigned.
-dave
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