Yo, I think Nick's hit on some important points here that have been thought about;
The schedules for the B Tour this year are going to be designed to find the correct number of qualifying teams for the next A Tour - not going as far as Triple Elimination like the Uni Regionals tournaments, but certainly having a 2v3 playoff if for example if 2 teams qualify. We should know for sure whether any Euro teams are entering the next Tour as they have to book their flights in advance, but I like your cutoff deadline suggestion - it's unfortunate BigEZ apparently aren't 100% yet, but on the plus the T0 schedule was fairly accurate for finding the top 12 teams too. So in the season proper, going into any B Tour, you should know where you need to finish to qualify for the A Tour (assuming there are no A dropouts etc). Obviously a 17 team A Tour schedule would be the ideal solution if it were an ideal schedule, but as you can imagine it means teams play different numbers and lengths of games and generally it would cause many arguments from whoever gets demoted / wants more for their money / blames their injuries on the schedule. 18 team A Tour schedule is better, though subject to approval, so if two Euro teams enter the A Tour then the B Tour could still qualify 3 teams. In general I'm in favor of the elite Euro teams getting a BYE to the top half of the A Tour - development of UK Ultimate must happen across the board, at one end we have the ladder league making it easier for teams to play close games against local opposition, in the middle we have the B Tour / lower A Tour where there is a fairly large pool of closely matched teams to fight against either to achieve promotion or avoid demotion, but at the top of the A Tour we just have the same 4-6 teams battling away at each other every tournament pretty much, each knowing how the others play very well, who their main threats are, if there are any weaknesses, etc. Without bringing new elements into the equation at the top, it risks going stale & its growth being stifled, so I feel the need to concentrate some efforts on this part of UK Ultimate's development is great, and some concessions could be made by those who are affected further down the line. The team who're most harshly done by with this specific situation I feel are Brighton, who by finishing 4th will be seeded 9th if BigEZ are put in the top 8, and so won't even get a chance to play against any of the top 4 finishers at A Tour 1, despite finishing 5th at Nationals last year. Still, it's not like Brighton didn't play MMJ for 3rd place at Tour 0... Felix __________________________________________________ BritDisc mailing list [email protected] http://fysh.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/britdisc Staying informed - http://www.ukultimate.com/staying-informed
