Why not use a religation/promotion system? If you have 16 teams at an age group, go 8 and 8 with the top 2 moving up and the bottome 2 moving down. This way it will still be competitive and teams that want to move "up" to the first division have to prove that they are strong enough to do so. This would also eliminate teams "playing down" to win. if you were the 1st place team, you would move up (thought I would throw that in, because of another thread that talked about an undefeated team playing classic instead of challenge in the spring).
