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Posted by Tournament
on 7/8/2009, 4:06 pm, in reply to "Clarification Request"
I am not sure I totally understand your question, particularly in regards to "fixtures," but it seems you've got the idea of it.
There is, however, a major element I forgot to describe. The 4 games take place over 4 time slots, and a team can ONLY PLAY ONE GAME PER SLOT. So essentially there are 4 "rounds." It's not just who you need to play, who you've played, and who they've played, but WHEN you need to play and WHEN they can play. That's why I suggested the table format because it helps you see which teams are available at which time slots. This is what I find most challenging about this problem.
As to the playoff procedure, it's not really important. Every team makes the playoffs (it's a kids tournament), which is a straight-up, single loss elimination bracket system: like the NCAA basketball tournament. What we need to figure out is the seeding for the playoffs.
We have other methods such as strength of schedule that break multi-team ties. The common opponent option is most important for later stages of such tiebreaks, like a 5 team tie that eventually is reduced to a 2 team tie by other methods. The first, and ideal, method for a 2-team tiebreaker is if the two teams actually played each other in preliminary rounds. That would be fair and simple, but since any given team has only 4 games, it's very likely that the given team has not played the team with which they are tied.
What we would like is at the very least to have them share a common opponent. That way, common opponent is the second option before we move to much less confident measures like strength of schedule and eventually even coin flip (and yes it comes to coin flip more than we would like).
The tournament has been played for years without this having being done. Also, some age groups have 18-25 teams, so this exercise isn't even possible for those divisions. It may not even be possible for this 14 team group given the "time-slot" dimension. I'm not sure. I am positive, however, that everything up to 13 was solved already. In other words, the show will go on whether I break this problem or not, but my organization like a fairer way of breaking 2-team ties than flipping a coin for the divisions in which it is possible.
Hope this helps.
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