We have a trophy and an idea, but no real way to work it out. Kind of putting the cart in front of the horse, but that's OK.
Here is what I am thinking:
Method 1 - Reseeding single elimination tournament.
We take the best 8 teams from each conference that are willing to participate. We can either seed them by EL, record last season (for returning teams), or owner/team rep vote.
The premise behind this is that we do not want to play teams within our own conference or at least as little as possible. Thus, we would need to re-seed matchups after each round to try to keep the two conferences playing one another.
Thus, round 1 we would match top seed from alpha against eight seed from zeta, second seed from alpha against seven seed from zeta, etc... In all likelihood most of the top seeds will win, thus ensuring there is a good mix of Alpha and Zeta teams for round two. What I am unsure about is how to handle if 5 from one conference win, and 3 from the other.
Idea 1 - Remove the lower seeded extra teams, and play it as a 6 team tournament. However, if the trophy is going to the winning team vs. the winning conference, then that is not fair to the two extra teams.
Idea 2 - Seed the top remaining teams from each conference against each other, then have the lower extra seeds play one another. The only issue I see with this is that it forces teams from the same conference to play one another, and I am not a fan of that. Not sure how everyone else feels.
-- If this is a winner take all tournament, we would keep playing and reseeding until there is only one team left. The conference of that team is the winner, along with the team.
-- If this is a tournament where the conference is the winner, then we would keep playing and reseeding until there is only one conference left. At that point, the conference remaining is the winner.
Method 1b - We could start with more than 8 teams per conference, thus improving the odds that we have enough teams per round from each conference to play each other and allowing more teams to participate. I just think we need to be sure we have the same number from each conference to start with.
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Method 2: Round robin tournament.
Again, we would need to limit the entrants to an even number from each conference. However, seeding is not as important, since we would randomly pick 3 opponents from the opposing conference for each team. Once those games are played, we could either tally the overall records for each conference or play a 2, 4, or 8 team tournament for the trophy. The participants and seeds would be the teams with the best records in round robin play.
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What do you guys think? What other thoughts do you guys have?
