Cav's Place

I watched the Europa League draw earlier and just have to throw this out here and ask what kind of mockery was that? They used a computer to do something, then set 24 ties by just drawing a few numbers to pair groups of teams in some order that was arrived at in ways that probably only they understood, and yet at the end drew the remaining five ties one by one? Seriously, who came up with that stupid idea and why did they bother to still try to make some sort of “show” out of it?
If they wanted to have a computer make the draw, they could have had a computer make the draw, start to end. If they wanted to still draw them one by one, they definitely could have drawn them one by one, though it’d have taken quite a while. And if they wanted to use this method of assigning a certain order of the teams in each group to a number and just draw the numbers to speed up the process, they could have done that for all teams and in a transparent way, which would have implied 24 numbers in each pot, to cover all the options, and reusing said numbers for each group, not removing them from the bowl. But what happened there made no sense whatsoever…
The only way I can imagine it working, particularly considering the fact that they didn’t reuse any numbers, is that the computer did make the draw and the numbers pulled out of the pots were just a little show, with no relevance whatsoever. Or perhaps they could have acted as the random seed for the computer program that made the draw, I guess that may be one other explanation, but then I once again get back to the fact that they were removed from the pot after being drawn once, which is at the very least questionable in this scenario. Not to mention that I find no reason for them to use one method for 24 ties and another for the remaining five.

Granted, I don’t like the fact that luck plays such a large part in the process either way, so would prefer to do without draws as much as possible, or at least to find and implement fair methods to greatly reduce the number of different options for each team to be drawn against. One simple way to do that would be to simply pair the teams according to their coefficients, perhaps after splitting them into seeded and unseeded according to the strength of the top divisions of the countries they represent and the positions they finished the previous season on, to at least somewhat lessen the penalties new teams will suffer under such a system. Or, at least in the Europa League, they could be placed into groups strictly according to geographic criteria and then paired as well as possible according to their coefficients while still avoiding matches between teams from the same country, which will also result in a more inclusive group stage as well.

But I only wanted to express some confusion here. If I get past that and start listing solutions, I’ll have to once again go through the various plans I made for these competitions over the years, when my mind happened to want to work on this sort of thing, and probably update them according to any changes that have taken place since I last wrote down such a plan, apparently two years ago, which is hardly what I feel like doing at the moment. I’m sure I will do it sooner or later, and perhaps eventually post something about it here as well, like I did in the past for the Romanian championship or the World Cup, but it won’t be today.

Later edit: Yes, I believe I figured out how it actually worked, with four groups of six and no changes in the position of the teams, but that makes it no less of a mockery, considering the low overall importance of the draw itself, which clearly was largely just a show in this scenario.