Proposal for Wildcard Reform

[Paul Richardson]

Currently the wildcard system rewards playing late regionals over early regionals. "Burned" wildcards could be reallocated to alleviate this.

If a team generates a wildcard that goes unused, retroactively create a wildcard at the earliest event where that team qualified for Championship and generated the least wildcards.

Spoiler for Hypothetical Scenarios:

Hypothetical Team A

Event 1: Regional Winner
Event 2: Regional Winner (wildcard used immediately)
Event 3: Regional Winner (wildcard unused)

A realistic scenario. Here the wildcard from Event 3 goes to Event 1, because Team A generated the least wildcards at Event 1.

Hypothetical Pre-qualified Team B

Event 1: Regional Winner and Regional Chairman's Award (2 wildcards used immediately)
Event 2: Regional Winner (wildcard unused)
Event 3: No awards
Event 4: Regional Winner (wildcard used immediately)
Event 5: Regional Winner (wildcard unused)

An unrealistic scenario for demonstration. Here the wildcard from Event 2 goes to Event 1, because Events 3-5 don't exist at that time. The wildcard from Event 5 goes to Event 4 because Event 4 has 1 wildcard from this team compared to 3 at Event 1. Event 2 also has only 1 wildcard, but is ignored because a wildcard already went unused at that event. Event 3 is ignored because Team B did not qualify there.