[octothorpe]

GP issues aside, I doubt this would be an effective strategy. Alliance picking is simply too unpredictable to make deliberately lowering your ranking worthwhile. Teams often intra-pick within the top 8, sometimes 3 or even 4 times, so a team ranked 9th, 10th, or 11th is generally more likely to end up in the 8th alliance captain's slot than the team ranked 8th at the start. Thus this strategy could easily be self-defeating. Also, sometimes the last qualifying match for a team can still be followed by 5 or more other matches in which they do not participate, which is more than enough time for the scores to shift and rankings to change, so it's unwise to base your strategy on exactly what your ranking was an hour before alliance pickings. And even if you could reliably "escape" the 8th-seeded slot, would you always want to? It's entirely possible that you could get picked yourself in the first round by one of the top 7 teams, in which case being 8th - and visible on the field - rather than 9th, and part of the big pool, might be desirable. Lastly, being on the 8th alliance might not be so bad; sometimes having three decent robots can be better than two hotshots and one flake.

After this year, 766 is especially qualified to speak on this matter. At SVR, the 8th seeded alliance captain was having trouble choosing a team to pick, so we cheered for them to pick us, and they did. Sure, we had to face a tough set of top-ranked teams, but we gave them a good fight, and it was better than not being in the finals at all. Then, at Davis, we were seeded 7th and had been hovering around the 8th slot. We would have worried about how to pick a strong alliance with so many of the good robots ranked above us, but as it happened, one of those good robots picked us – the first pick of the first round, no less.

In summary, alliance pickings can be very difficult to predict, and sabotaging your score is probably more likely to harm you than help you, even in the described situation.