More fun with algorithms / Excel(?)

[britrock88]

This is more of an abstract thought process about using Excel to streamline a doable manual process. I schedule preseason tourneys including all the human coaches in an online FBCB league (wwcbonline.net). As a rule of thumb, I rank all the human-coached teams by prestige and go from there. What adds the thinking to the process is that I also follow these rules:

1. Don't put 2 teams from a conference in the same tournament.
2. Don't put 2 teams coached by the same person in the same tournament.

Being that I use eight-team preseason tourneys, the number of tourneys I create has to accommodate (in addition to all the human-coached teams) all the human-coached schools in the conference with the largest number of human-coached teams. (Participants coach up to 3 teams; that hasn't proven a limiting factor in this regard.)

For example, last season, there were 42 teams, and as many as 7 in one conference, so both criteria required there be 7 tournaments (using CPU schools as fillers). This season, there are 39 teams, with as many as 4 from one conference, so 5 tourneys are necessary.

After all this, the question is this: is there a way to automate this process?