Sunday, September 18, 2022

What if Florida had used a random schedule for 9.0 Mixed Sectionals?

I wrote several posts about the Florida 9.0 Mixed Sectionals that were played this weekend where four teams finished 4-0, but only two could advance.

I've also started doing visualizations of unflighted round-robin schedules to get an idea of who is playing who at a glance, and to see if there are pockets or islands of match-ups or other oddities.

I was asked what a proper random schedule would have looked like for this event, so I created one!

For reference, here is the schedule that was used.


You can clearly see that they seemingly created two groups of five teams, and then had them play matches only against the other group.  This led to the possibility of five 4-0 teams, and it ended up being that there were four.

Here is a schedule generated from my random schedule generator.


This clearly looks different and there is a lot of cross play between different teams, and there are no clear groups or pods of teams.  And when run through my simulator, there is a zero percent change of five or four undefeated teams, and a less than 2% chance of three undefeated teams.  I'm guessing all involved would have been happier with this schedule.


No comments:

Post a Comment