The stupid NCAA is almost decided they will have 96 teams in the NCAA Tournament from now on. Pathetic. They're so greedy they would ruin the sprot for exatra money.

And now I have to redo sports betting system to allow 96 teams.

Also the NCAA runs the NIT currently and I just found out there is no longer any consolation game! So I spent time adding that feature for nothing. All a mess.

They changed their mind and it will have 68 teams instead of 65 or 96.

Won't be too hard to add that to the sports betting system,but it will be in annoying fashion... because basically since I've already done other tournaments and the coding with picks named pick1, pick2, pick3, etc... the easiestw ay to do this would be to have these new three games be picks with high numbers wheras the other playin game is pick1. So the picks will be stored very dodly in the database, but it's probably better than having to edit/changs things. And I have to leave the 64 and 65 formats as options where the results will show properly for past tournaments.

Yeah when I saw that knew it was going to make it easier to code.

Great. Turns out it makes it very annoying to code because they didn't simply let the 15s play the 16s. The new rules are that the final added teams play each other and the final 16s play each other. So there is NOTHING set in stone as to the seeds of the last four added teams. I can't simply declare that the 12 seeds all play each other, the 13s, or any specific seed. So now it has to be set up where the admin is going to have to set which seeds are going to be playing each other.

Once it gets to the final 64 everything is the same. So all that changes is the first round.

Wow. Whoever determined the new rules are annoying and weird. I've got to figure this all out.

I guess the bottom line is there are two open slots for the final four added teams and two open slots for the worst four teams. So for instance let's say the last 2 slots for teams are for a #12 and a #13. Well then that would mean there would be 5 #12s and 5 #13s. If the final two slots were both for #13s then there would be 6 #13s. Then for the WORST teams there will basically be 6 #16s. Then the winners of those two play in games would cut it to the normal 4.

I am mainly posting this as a reminder to myself to wrap my head around how I need to code this. Since the seeds can be DIFFERENT for the final four added teams and there's no way to know what they will be each year I think all I can do is have a page where the admin enters all of the 8 teams involved in playins, desinates numbers for them where it will be known by the database/php where the winners will slide into slots in the bracket, then once the coding is done to slide them into the right slots everything would be the same after that first round.

That first round is called the "first four" I think.

So assuming I understand this correctly I know what to do. I was stumped for a while because I was thinking what if the last four teams added all have different seeds. But that's impossible. The bottom line is they don't seed them ALL differently. They do their first 34 teams seeded the same as normal. It's teams 35-38 where they have to make them fit into two slots. And so basically they just double the seeds.

Well it's taken me 2 hours to set up the database changes and the php, lang bits, and skin templates for the adding process. That's not including the hours spent thinking about the best way to do it. I would just randomly think it out during everyday life. lol

So now I just have to update the user's picking process, the display of it on your page, and the payout part of it. So probably another 1-2 hours then I'm done. It's tricky partly due to the weird new NCAA rules and also due to the weird way I had the existing setyup for tournament brackets to begin with. I had an odd way of handling team #65 so now in this new format teams 65-68 were trickier than they needed to be.

What a headache. When you have so many bracket types and so many ways of handling them it gets complicated.

Bottom line is I have now spent about 5 or so hours adding this feature. Now I am down to only 2 functions left to mess with and then testing though. This got very tricky. And since barely anyone here ever does the contests it's kind of going to go to waste unless I sell it to people who want a 68 setup.

Spent 3 more hours. Now I am done except for changes in 1 skin template bit and testing to be sure I didn't mess up.

Not much extra code was needed, but it was looking at the old code and figuring out how to do it which took so long. So I've spent about 8 hours and all the coding from that amount of time only totaled 254 new lines. The main sports file itself is over 14,000 lines, just for reference.