I appreciate both STRO's desire for a template, as well as GONE D's apt analogy and desire not to overthink things. I'm thinking that there is room for both to be accommodated.
In my efforts to salvage some early information from the old BadBart site before it goes away (see other post), I have been struck at just how variable the rules were in the early days, including (at least one year) wild card slots that in the early rounds went to the top-scoring losers the previous week. This interested me in particular because a few years ago some of my teammates suggested using a double-elimination repechage style bracket for one of the tournaments. Although we eventually voted to go another way, I remember thinking at the time that while it was certainly a valid form of competition which could arguably produce reliably stronger final rounds, it may be considered "too radical" by some people. And here I find that the early wild-card rule actually resembled some of the principles of repechage in at least one of the earliest tournaments.
For a while, The Fellowship chose to run its tournaments World-Cup style, with a preliminary round of eight or nine four-team groups, the winners of which would get automatic seeds in the elimination rounds, with the balance of the bracket filled with the best-performing non-group-winners.
A number of the earliest tournaments also allowed the defending champion to give itself the #1 seed (and occasionally a resulting first-round bye) regardless of its performance in the time leading up to the tournament. Some also allowed computer-using teams to play, although they would be subject to either a standard point penalty or a challenge system. Re-seeding the advancing teams each round by their score the previous week was also tried multiple times. And BO reminds us of a year in which Brainbuster scores were combined with the Showdown scores each week.
If there is a point to all of this, perhaps it might be that those of us of a certain age remember the knock-down, drag-out fights over rules in an earlier era. More recently--at least for most of the tournaments of the past several years or so--there has been much less variation and there has also been (perhaps not coincidentally) much less dispute over the rules than there used to be. Does this mean that the community has reached some form of consensus that the present rules are broadly fair and acceptable? Perhaps.
But even here, new rules have been accreting in response to certain specific instances. For example, for the past several iterations the following language has been found at the end of the rules:
Quote:
In general, we take no responsibility for and offer no solution nor redress for localized problems (i.e. power outages, lack of players due to illness or vacation, etc.) with one possible exception: If a team in the semi-finals or finals suffers a documentable and unavoidable mid-game crash, its victorious opponent may invite that team to a rematch, but is under no obligation to do so.
I believe the first occurrence of the first part of that sentence (through "etc.") came from Kalamazoo's rules, in response to seemingly annual complaints about crashed systems in the early rounds which knocked out teams and prompted them to ask for "do-overs." I think there was general agreement that this would be unfair to all of the other teams and could make tournaments interminable if it happened multiple times. However, the second part (starting "with one possible exception...") was added in response to a specific event during a semifinal game between The Fellowship and Tailgate in the 2010 Sandbag. Tailgate's system crashed during the Lightning Round and they posted no score. By the rules, the Fellowship could have easily taken the resulting forfeit into the finals, but the team voted pretty much unanimously that they didn't want to "win" that way, and with the permission and support of the Commissioner, we granted Tailgate a semifinal rematch the following week. We wanted to make sure that the rules were flexible enough to allow this in the future, which is why we added that language to the following year's rules. They have been in most of the rules since, I believe.
All of this is to say that--using this case study as an example--I think it may be possible to find some middle ground here, in which 1) teams would have some freedom to issue their own rules, and 2) Commissioners would still have some latitude in interpreting rules. I would be reluctant to support a proposition that would constrain either 1) or 2) too much, but I suspect STRO's proposition would not be so procrustean as to do that.
If there are two constants in ALL 34 of the Cup Tournaments so far (McCarthy and Sandbag), they are that they all had a head-to-head component, and the winners had the honor of setting the rules and running the tournament the next year (or appointing someone else to do so). Maybe if we are coming up with a template, it could be as simple as an understanding that these rules continue to obtain, with certain guidelines to help commissioners deal with disputes in an equitable way.