Ideas to move in the direction of making FIRST competitions 'fair'

[Donut]

Originally Posted by KenWittlief

the four divisions at the Championship crossed my mind on the drive home tonight. If we did have different classes or levels of regional awards, there could be 4 divisions of competition at the championship: rookie / expert / unlimited / student built...

This 4 division talk got me thinking of a possible way to give teams that don't do as well at the competition to get in the playoffs (besides the alliance selection thing).

The answer could be regions. Have each regional split up into regions (there would be regions for half the amount of alliances, so at the standard 8 alliance regional there would be 4 regions, at a super-regional with 12 alliances there would be 6 regions, etc.). These regions would be split as evenly as possible (7 teams per region at an event with 28 teams, regions not divisible by 4 may have a few regions with 1 team more or less than the others).

Most competitions have 8-12 matches played per team in qualifiers. Of these, some would become "region games", in which all of your opponents and partners are made up of teams only from your region. Every team in the region would need to play the same number of region games if possible; ideally a team would also play against and with every team in their region at least once, but the odds of that working out are low I think.

Then, when it comes time to declare alliance captains, each Region Winner (the team with the best REGION record, and if that is tied some kind of tiebreaker will need to be invented) will be guaranteed a spot as an alliance captain. This means half the alliance captains will be Region Winners, while the other half are still open to the teams who placed well but just didn't win their region (wildcard spots, bascially).

Since Region Winners are based off of your region record, a team that goes 3-8 in the competition overall but 3-0 in their region can become an alliance captain (for winning their region).

Now of course the odds are that a team not doing so well will have to face at least one powerhouse team in their region, but if they get the right alliance partners or have a lucky match they can beat them and win the region with that, rather than having to get lucky in numerous matches to place high enough to be an alliance captain with the current system.

Now if you found a way of classifying different teams you could try to create regions of all rookies, all teams without mentors, etc. Some teams might get left out if there aren't enough rookies to make a full region, or there's too many, or something like that, but it will give some a better shot.

Regions could also be used in Championship divisions as well.