There are protections, I just suppose said tournament director did not assign a high enough value to the "minimum games completed" box when creating the tourney.
However, as to sandbagging one's rating to get into a lower-rated tourney, there aren't protections for that.
Why is there not a rule in place to keep new players ranked 1200 from joining 1200-1400 ranked tourny's then sky rocketing to 2000+ and dominating it?