Championship Event - Where the "Random" Match Sorting Really "Shines"

[GaryVoshol]

FIRST has decided, with the help of "Bob the FTA", that a tiering system is desired. That decision may be suspect, but it has a noble goal, to even out competition. It is similar to the serpentine draft.

The problem is deciding which teams get into which tiers. Team number is not the way to go. If you go to a regional with few rookies, the 3rd tier gets distorted - such as including 1114 at GLR. At the other end, there are teams with very low numbers who have a poor year, or who have had a long-term decline due to various factors (losing sponsors or mentors comes to mind) and are just shells of their former glory. When a team signed up for FIRST does not indicate how well or poorly that team will perform.

We need a pre-defined tournament match structure, something like
Round 1, Match 1 - Teams A/B/C play teams D/E/F
Match 2 - Teams G/H/I play teams J/K/L
Etc.

Rounds 2 through X are defined with constraints - no multiple partners / opponents, maximize time between rounds, etc. Once a program is written that can do these permutations, it can be run for any number of teams in a regional or Championship division, from 24 to 100. Now we have defined match schedules, and all that remains is to randomly assign team numbers to the A, B, C, D ... positions in the schedule.