Club Talk: An Idea to Improve the Club Regular Season

So what if we made some adjustments to add higher odds to the slow regular season events?

September 4, 2024 Josh Katz inside Idea with comments

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Problem

Inward Professional Championships There was some chatter online this past weekend about the true value of this tournament. Some of the criticism was specific to this year’s edition — the World Ultimate Championship isn’t going to exploit the best players every year, for example — but other arguments were more general and had merit.

Some of those arguments involve the format (an eight-team tournament doesn’t need three days, some teams have struggled with extra-long byes and rest imbalances, and every team has played a game that has made group play largely irrelevant). There was also a general sense of “what’s the point of all this?” (just one proposal to switch regions between the projections made heading into the weekend and the official rankings released on Monday). It would be good for USAU to make some changes, not just to Pro Champs, but to the regular season in general. And today, I’m going to help them on their way to making the regular season relevant again.

Plan

The most important part of this proposal is increasing the size of the National Tournaments to 20 teams per division (I’ll explain why in a second). So, with 20 teams currently competing at Nationals, there are potentially 12 power bids on the table. But there’s a twist here: We’ll be sticking with the current eight power bids. To incentivize teams to do everything they can to win TCT events, instead of just performing well, we’re reserving two bids for the winners of the US Open and Pro Champs. After the regular season, we’re pulling both of those teams from the rankings. Their matches still count toward the rankings, but they’re not ranked as if they didn’t meet the minimum match threshold. If that means the next highest-ranked team in the region is somewhere in the fifties, that’s fine.¹ If the same team wins both events, we simply add back a power bid for someone else in the division to claim.

These are just two bids; where do the other two go? These are open to further discussion and debate, and I’m not entirely sold on the details, but there are some concepts I like. The third “extra” bid goes to a Pro-Elite Challenge in some way. Once PEC-East and West are complete, the two winners play each other for a bid. Ideally, both teams would play the same tournament later in the year, and some sort of seeding trick could be done to make the “PEC Champions Challenge” happen during pool play. Otherwise, USAU could and should work with the two teams to find a way to play this game (there should be some sort of penalty if this game isn’t played, but I haven’t thought about that yet). Alternatively, we could go back to a single PEC event, and winning the PEC would give the same rewards as winning the US Open or Pro Champs.

The final bid is a bit more complicated; instead of going to a specific team, it goes to a region. Specifically, the winner of the Elite-Select Challenge goes to a region. The ESC is a weaker field than any of the previous tournaments mentioned by design, so winning doesn’t earn an automatic bid. But here’s the key: the winner of the ESC doesn’t get knocked out of the standings. If the team that wins the ESC also wins one of the eight power bids, it’s a double-dip for the region. Go win the ESC, earn yourself a spare chance at Nationals (and/or help your regional friends in their quest to qualify).

As noted, a 20-team National Championship is required for this proposal to be successful.² Care In the current structure, with only 16 teams in each division, there wouldn’t be enough power bids for most teams to feel like they could win a championship with four bids determined by TCT tournaments. My personal fear in this scenario is that teams will skip the regular season entirely and focus solely on winning their own division, but there are many potential pitfalls that can arise when there are only four strong teams.

Conclusion

Now it’s time to see the bid in action. As an example, I’ll lay out what the bid picture might look like for this year’s Mixed Division. For the sake of this exercise, let’s say Seattle BFG beat Austin Disco Club in the PEC Champions Challenge.³ With that in mind, the three automatic bids were going to BFG, Ann Arbor Hybrid (for winning the US Open) and Fort Collins Shame (for winning the Pro Champs), who will be withdrawn from the rankings and will not play in the Series. North Central will receive a bonus bid thanks to Minneapolis Drag’n Thrust winning the ESC. The final bid allocation will be as follows:

• Great Lakes – 1+1 auto offer
• Mid-Atlantic – 1
• Northeast – 4
• Northwest – 4+1 automatic offer
• North Center – 2
• Southeast – 2
• Southwest – 2
• South Center – 1+1 automatic offer

The highlights of this arrangement include: Chicago Parlay “owning” the Great Lakes autobid while placing 51st in the standings, North Central’s ESC bonus bid going to Madison NOISE (35th), and Burlington Big Rig finishing as the last team above the cutoff, just one ranking point (!!) ahead of Nashville ‘Shine and Washington DC Rally. If each region goes by ranking, the Nationals field will include:

• Great Lakes: Hybrid (auto), Parlay
• Mid-Atlantic: Philadelphia AMP
• Northeast: New York XIST, Lexington Sprocket, Boston Slow, Big Truck
• Northwest: BFG (automobile), Vancouver Red Flag, Seattle Mixtape, Montana MOONDOG, Seattle Spoke
• North Central: Drag’n Thrust, NOISE
• Southeast: Durham Toro, Huntsville Space Force
• Southwest: Sacramento Tower, San Francisco Mischief
• South Central: shame. (auto), Disco Club

It’s not perfect, but nothing is. But it’s a good bid (in my humble opinion), fitting in with a very exciting regular season and some particularly interesting regionals. Teams like Toronto UNION and Ithaca Townies will jump at the chance to steal Big Rig’s bid, and the same goes for Oregon Scorch and Seattle Smack!, who are looking at MOONDOG and Spoke. Or, just look at Cincinnati Steamboat and Chicago RAMP, who are right behind Parlay in the Great Lakes standings. All three now have solid bids to play for, rather than (probably) the privilege of getting crushed by Hybrid in the regional finals.

To the readers, I don’t expect you to like this idea. But just think about it, mull it over, consider the implications and potential. And let’s talk to USAU about how we can make the regular season fun again.