Originally Posted By: mlord
And especially if it could arrange things so that all four teams from the semis get an even shot at the Silver medal, too.
[...]
But time and television constraints...

I expect the constraint here -- the reason single-elimination is used in the final stages -- is the requirement that the final match decides the gold. Which is really "excitement profile management" rather than TV constraints as such...

There's probably also some sort of Arrow's Paradox in operation here, that says that not all these superficially-plausible constraints on the competition structure can be satisfied at once.

Peter