[EricH]

I don't know about having surrogate teams (outside of the normal ones). It's kind of like, "Hey could you guys fill in for team XXXX right away?" You're really going to irritate some people.

I also don't see this being too much of an issue. 90% of matches have two full alliances. The other 10% are mainly due to broken robots. Stick the robot onto the field, get it away from its launch pad, and disable it or drive around doing nothing.