First of all, I discussed this with the tournament directors and we collectively came to
this decision. It was posted over a week ago and no one commented on it, so I have very little left over for the people complaining now. I'll also note that
Fireburn must have misread the post, as I said that the playoff would be decided with a Bo3 match of XY/BW/DPP.
I'll explain why the decision was made. We established from the beginning of the tournament that the top 2 teams would qualify to play in the finals. Now going into week 5, the Drizzlers were 4-0-0, so had already qualified for the final. With this in mind, Melee Mewtwo sent in a lineup specifically with the intention of throwing the week, since he deemed the Helix Fossils the easiest opponent. He told his players to throw, which two of them did. Now it didn't explicitly prohibit this in the rules, nor in the rules for any previous Premier League tournaments, but we considered it unsportsmanlike behavior. As a result, the games were replayed and the person responsible, Melee Mewtwo, was banned from the tournament as well as given an Unsportsmanlike Conduct infraction. However, since it wasn't explicitly stated in the rules, we didn't deem it appropriate to punish the team as a whole for what their manager did.
This put us in a position where the Fossils, who were 2-1-1 going into the week, had a significantly easier opponent than the Rays and the Zekroms had when they faced the Drizzlers. The Rays and the Zekroms were both on 2-2-0, but the Zekroms had a +5 win-loss record while the Rays were at +2 (largely because the Zekroms beat the Rays 6-2 in the first week). Both the Zekroms and the Rays won week 5, putting them at 3-2-0, with the Zekroms at a better w-l record.
The Fossils ended up beating the Drizzlers, but since Melee Mewtwo had sent his lineup with the specific purpose of losing, we needed a method to fairly decide which team would finish 2nd, if MM2 hadn't done so. We don't know whether the Fossils would have won, lost or tied if they had faced a Drizzlers team looking to win. As a result, we decided that the fairest method would be a playoff game against the Zekroms, who would have finished 2nd, had the Fossils lost or tied. With the other results of week 5, the Rays would not have been able to reach 2nd either way.
As I mentioned earlier, the original intent was for the play off game to be decided in a Bo3. If
Sweep and
Blim both agree to it, we can play a Bo3 instead of the full 8-man match, to save time and move onto the finals.