Breaking News! - 2018 USTA League Nationals Format Change

I was just reading the player handbook for one of the 2018 USTA League Nationals and read something I'd missed before that I think is a pretty big deal!  There is going to be a new format to the flights/matches during the round-robin phase of Nationals.

Specifically, here is a quote from the document.

Teams will compete in 4 unflighted matches against randomly selected opponents.  Teams can expect to play 2 matches on Friday and 2 matches on Saturday.  On Sunday, the top 4 teams, based on TennisLink standings, will advance to the semifinals, followed by the finals and the 3rd/4th match.  In the event of a team match tie, the tie will be broken by the first of the following procedures:

• Winner of the most individual matches in the competition
• Winner of head to head match
• Loser of the fewest number of sets
• Loser of the fewest number of games
• A method to be determined by the Championship Committee

* Format and schedule are subject to change due to unforeseen circumstances.

In past years, the format was that teams were split into (normally) four flights, four teams per flight except for one flight having five teams (due to 17 sections).  A team would play three (or four for the five team flight) round-robin matches and the winners of each flight would advance to the semis.

It sounds like there will still be four teams advancing to the semis, but the round-robin will be a whole lot different.  Rather than playing teams in your flight, you will just play four other teams and whoever has the four best records by the criteria listed will advance.

I don't know the motivation for this, but would guess that it is to give the second place team from a tough flight a chance of still advancing to the semis and not punish them for perhaps being the second best team at Nationals and just being in the unlucky tough flight.

However, it would seem that you are just changing the luck of the draw, as by having 17 teams and only playing four of them, whoever lucks into playing weaker teams is still going to advance (just like the winner of a weak flight), and if the best two teams happen to play each other in round-robin, one will still end up with a loss and have a hard time advancing regardless.

They say it will be random opponents, and if so there will surely be luck involved.  And by not playing against the same teams in your flight as who you are trying to have a better record than, a lot won't be in your control.  And it isn't terribly fair to be compared on most of the tie-breaking criteria against a team you didn't play and may not have even had any common opponents with.

I'll have to do some analysis to look at recent years to do what "what ifs", but on the surface, I'm not sure this will be better, but hopefully is not worse and is perhaps just different.

What do you think, will this format be better, worse, or just different?

Update: See additional thoughts in this later blog entry