Award Ceremony & Divisional Playoffs...

[Joe Johnson]

Hey all,

As any long time Chief Delphi Forum reader knows, many folks have advocated playing the divisional playoffs as part of the award ceremony (especially folks from the Chief Delphi Forum and especially ME -- though in honestly, the idea was not original to me. As I recall, Chris Hibner of 308 was the first to advocate it publicly on this forum).

I was shocked to see that FIRST actually did it at the Championships this year.

Sadly, because was not able to attend, I was not able to judge the effectiveness of this idea in action.

From what I was able to see on the web over a dial up modem, it was not a flawless execution (e.g. the transitions from games to awards and back could have been smoother).

Even so, it seemed to be a great improvement over prior years where a slim minority of FIRST folks actually watched the penultimate and ultimate rounds of the Grand Championship and the vast majority of the crowd was nearly bored to the point of violence during the relentlessly lengthy award ceremony.

So... ...for any folks who were actually in TX watching the Grand Championship / Award Ceremony, what do you think?

Joe J.

P.S. Please try to remove from your vote the fact that the second match of each elimination round was almost a forgone conclusion – this was a fault of the game design and not due to the format change I would like to evaluate.