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Re: Championship 2008 - Atlanta - Your Thoughts Please
I haven't seen it mentioned, but I think the placement of the screens in the pits was pretty inconvenient. Having screens positioned such that they can't be seen from 90% of the pits seems pretty poor. I think positioning them back to back over the central display area would make it a bit easier for teams to see matches without having to worry about deserting the pits and missing the judges. Better still, place two screens at either end of the pits. I suppose this might lead to a little more loitering in the aisles of the pits, but honestly, I don't see how it could get much worse than it usually is anyways.
Also, I kind of like the idea of 6 divisions. I think 6 independent divisions is a better idea than 4 divisions with 8 fields. Mostly because of the scheduling and coordination nightmares inherent in two fields. I think it's a pretty safe assumption that an extra field only gets you somewhere between 50%-75% more matches, because the fields absolutely have to stay in sync at all times. You can't just dump teams on the first available field, because they need to know which field to show up on. And with the turnaround times for teams you'd be talking about, I don't think you could let the fields get more than 2 matches out of sync. Maybe just 1. So on the whole, I'd prefer 8 divisions to 2 fields per division.
Anyways, back to running Elims for 6 divisions. You do realize that Major League Baseball solved this problem for us about a decade ago, right? That's right, you could have two wild card teams. Determine them as you wish, but I would suggest a short round robin between two 3 alliance groups of finalists of the different divisions. I mean how often have we fretted about how strong Galileo is and how much of a shame it is that only one winning alliance could come out of it? How awesome would it be for a wild card team to rematch against the alliance they faced in their division. There are other solutions to the problem, of course. You could do the 3 alliance round robin of division champions and take the top two teams from each group. Heck, this would work well for an 8 division championship. Two 4 alliance round robins take 6 matches to finish, barring a tiebreaker match, and they could be played on parallel fields flanking Einstein. Which would be a lot faster than the minimum 8 matches you'd have to play for a single elimination playoff.
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The difficult we do today; the impossible we do tomorrow. Miracles by appointment only.
Lone Star Regional Troubleshooter
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