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Steel Gauntlet Qualification Process

The Blackbox Trophy now includes Q, E and W indicators next to each team's listing. They are related to the Steel Gauntlet Tournament that follows the Box Trophy season. The numbers refer to the team's standing in the league table for their roster.

• E-n means that your team has reached the status of Eligible to play in the Gauntlet, but it is not Qualified yet, either because there are better teams of that specific roster above it, or you have another team that is Qualified.

• Q-n means that your team is currently Qualified. This might be because it's the best of its kind (Q-1) or the E-1+ teams above it belong to another coach that has a Qualified team with a higher score. In the latter case, your team will be marked Q-2+

• W-n means that your team is Qualified as a Wildcard. As there are 28 different rosters and a full 5-rounds bracket needs 32 teams, the best 4 non-qualifying teams (from coaches that haven't got a better placed Qualified team) are drafted as well.

If you have any teams like that, in the "My Squads" section of the boxtrophy page you should see a Playoff Settings button that allows you to opt in, or out, of the Steel Gauntlet.

The draft process works as follows:

The first pass goes through the team standings list from the top, and for each team it checks two things:

    * Does the coach already have a team that was qualified
    * Is there a team with the same roster that has qualified

If both of those are "No", the team is marked as qualified. Then this is repeated for each team down the list. The same thing is done a second time, but the second check is instead:

    * Is there 32 qualified teams

Then for the actual draw, there is another constraint where any team that isn't opted in to the Gauntlet will be entirely skipped. These opt-in selections are not visible to anyone but the coach of a team at the moment, but once the season ends it'll be shown, and the coach can no longer change anything.