Making heads or tails of the new announcement...

[Nate Smith]

Originally posted by tjrage_25
1) How you did last year should have NO influence on whether or not you can attend the nationals. The game is completely new this year, and is never similar from one year to the next. So why should the winners of a different game get a definite yes on going to the nationals this year? How any of the regional or national winners did last year does not necessarily determine how good they will be this year.

2) Same as above, any of any team's standings or awards from last year should not effect this! The slate is wiped clean, and this competition is supposed to be the complete OPPOSITE of last years competition in the aspect of offense/defense.

3) The even over odd registration for the nationals, I just don't get how you can determine if a team is worthy of going to the nationals by team number.
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Having attended one of the team forum events, I can try to help answer why FIRST has decided to do things the way they have. As Andy mentioned, they did get our input via the team forums as to what would be the best way to do this inevitable thing. What was expressed(at least as the Michigan forum) was that the issue of last-minute planning for nationals was a large concern. For this reason, FIRST has implemented the way of using the previous year as a qualifier, so that at least some of the teams taking the trip to florida have the extra time to plan.

As for using the team number to determine who gets the "extra" slots, my feeling on this is that they were looking for a way to still give every team a chance to attend at least every other year, and limiting the teams that can use the "unassigned" slots by even or odd team numbers seems to be no better than any other way that they could determine who got to use the remaining slots...