FRC Blogged - What Do You Think? The ‘Invite to Decline’ Strategy

[BenB]

As long as the qualification system remains the way it was this year where teams are ranked by wins (not including coopertition points) and the first tie breaker is based on that teams performance (such as AP, CP, TP), not something based on the performance of the teams they are playing against (such as Qualification Score), then the likelihood of a team that somebody would decline seeding high is very low. This is especially true at events with a reasonable amount of qualification matches to help filter out the undesirable teams from seeding high.

When teams do implement the "scorch the earth" strategy, they are trying to keep strong alliances from forming, therefore they are picking strong teams and aren't really getting stuck with anyone, they just might be getting their number 2 or 3 choice rather than their number 1 choice.

I agree that teams earn the privilege to implement this strategy. However, as long as there are enough matches at each event and the ranking system lends itself to ranking the stronger teams high, I don't think we will see this strategy implemented very often. I would guess that the "scorch the earth" strategy was used much less this year that it has for the past several years.