FIRST has addressed the problem of teams fighting over starting position by making the lower seeded alliance set up on the field first. This solution works well at the regionals, and will be fine in the division finals, but there are potential problems when the “final four” division champions come together. It is possible in these matches for two alliances with the same seed ranking to come play one another. FIRST needs to set a precedent for determining who sets up first in this scenario, otherwise we very well could have some bad backs from team members moving their robots side to side during pre-match setup.
In that case the reasonable way to do it would be by the flip of coin or other equal opportunity method of chance since both teams are equally deserving. Other ways they could do it are to go to regional competion results to determine a higher seed but that method is not necessarily “fair”. In fact going by the divisional seeding results isn’t necessarily fair either in my opinion because your rankings are not from playing the same teams so they really don’t correlate. I would suggest the afforementioned coin flip or drawing divison names from a hat to level the playing field.
i like the coin flip idea. this seams to be the most fair…if of course anything is fair…but then one must ask…who gets to call the coin toss? oh we are in quite the connundrum. What if woody wrote a number between 1 and infinity down and each team guessed a number and whoever was closest won (or 1-10 if you’re into that kind of thing) that gives each alliance a chance to guess…but who guesses first? i guess it’s all going to come down to gracious professionalism and accepting things as they are. if your alliance is deserving enough to win national championships…you should be able to withstand picking first or second.
the number picking gets my vote.
Edit:
after re-reading the post before mine…i like the drawing names from a hat idea
this is an interesting point. it just may work. plus with good scouting one can kind of predict where a team will want to set up…of course…this means scouting every division and every team (295 in all) or some kind of scouting network.
This is what the rule was suppossed ot do, and it was put in place in responce for the time delay due to 2 teams in the national finals last year jockeying from side to side and not just setting up, yet waiting for the other alliance to place first. Hope it doesnt occur again.
Maybe FIRST should make a coin with one red side and one blue side and let the head ref flip it prior to any match between two alliances of simmilar seeding.
This is the type of coin flip I was refering to. In wrestling they do this with a red/green coin and the winner chooses staring position for the 2nd round, while the other person chooses starting position for the third round. (For those who don’t know neutral position is used for round 1 always.) This way no one has a chance to call the flip for an advantage.
