National Rankings during the Season

[Andrew]

I was wondering if anyone would be interested in participating in a Coach's Poll to determine National Rankings of FIRST teams throughout the season?

In most college sports, there is a ranking survey of sports writers to determine who is the "best" team in the country. I thought that doing something like that for FIRST might be entertaining. Instead of sports writers, however, one could use one coach from each team to accomplish the voting.

This idea has sort of been percolating since some comments made by Joe Johnson in this thread:

http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?s=&sortfield=lastpost&sortorder=&forumid=6&pagenumber=1&daysprune=100&x=13&y=2

about how to include team scouting information in the rankings.

What I figured could be done is that one designated coach from each veteran team could submit their top three teams (excluding your own team of course) in four to six categories. This info would feed into a formula to determine who the top twenty teams in the country are. This would be updated once a week (say by Tuesday or Wednesday) during the season (ie after each regional).

In the fullness of time, such a ranking system might be useful for seeding divisions at Nationals or changing the way that qualification is done at regionals.

[Jeff Waegelin]

It's certainly an interesting idea. It would take some work to get it started, for sure, but I think it would be fun to do. I don't think it should ever have any official bearing, but unofficially it would be fun.

[Ryan Albright]

I think its a good idea. Dont you think this poll might be a little unfair. There are teams that are more popular then others. I would see the teams taht have beena round and have more popularity being higher ont eh list then teams that dont have it beening on the lsit

[piotrm]

ya, the method would have to be modified to get rid of the popularity issues; perhaps instead of letting people list their top # of teams; each one would be given a few teams from their area and they would have to rank them in a few categories; it would have to be made so that each team is shown the exact same number of times for rankings; this would certainly be harder to do but would possibly get rid of the popularity issue

or another way would be to provide a popularity rating alongside the method you people mentioned; perhaps make the scorers list the top few most peopular teams in their opinion; afterwards this popularity ranking would be normalized (flattened) with the team rankings being modified proprtionally to this popularity normalization

good luck

[Rich Kressly]

I really dislike this idea. Rankings/Polls (while they may be fun and full of good intentions) have, in many respects, done more harm to college athletics than good. I have coached Div III athletics and I've seen how unfair and negative these polls can be. After a season begins and ACTUAL DATA is tracked in terms of match wins and losses, who wins what awards at what regionals, who progresses to the quarters, semis and finals will give you a real measure of expertise and performance and is more useful information.

On the other hand, polls based on gut feeling and partial information will generate a list that is largely unuseful and potentially destructive. Hard feelings, more 'who is better than who threads', etc will result. We've seen this before on Chiefdelphi and many of us work hard to ensure that it doesn't happen any more as it isn't in the true spirit of FIRST.

In college athletics all individual recruits and athletes are tracked and strengths and weaknesses of each team and individual are published in several publications. Also remember that very few rules change in the NCAA games. In FIRST, the rules change every year. The parallel is a poor one.

I don't mean to sound harsh, but it is our task, as set forth by our founder, to work at CHANGING the culture to one that works at collaborating through competition so we all win. In my humble opinion, this type of movement would be falling into the current societal trappings that lead to separation.

Chiefdelphi already has the ventures system to allow those who want to "bet" to do so. I'm not so sure I even like this feature of Chiefdelphi, but, as long as it doesn't lead to mudslinging in the forums, I suppose it's harmless.

Let's keep the central focus of FIRST where it belongs. For those of you who didn't see the thread posted by the Husky Brigade about two weeks ago, I suggest you visit their website and read excerpts from a very imprtant Dean Kamen speech that Andy Baker and others are calling required reading for all FIRSTers.

Let's put our talents, energy, and efforts toward the mission of the program and set the example for other competitive programs to follow.

[John JediMaster]

I think this could be really interesting considering the number of teams. But how would it be done?

[WakeZero]

It is a good idea, but there are far too many teams and far too few unbiased opinions for such a ranking system to work :(

[Gadget470]

I don't like the idea. That's not what this "sport" is about. It's not about wins and losses, who's better than who, who's cooler than who.

Respect who you think deserves it, appreciate what others do for you, your team, or the "sport"... but don't grade them on it. A national championship is nothing without a lesson learned. A rank system would be fully meaningless. Coaches are as biased as students.

NO coach can say they are 100% unbiased, not even the many esteemed ones. They still don't like some team for one reason or another and will "grade" them accordingly.

This sport is too close to pure sportsmanship to rank teams.

[Ken Loyd]

Sorry folks, I don't think much of the idea. It would be good for bragging but not very gracious.

Wait a few years and Las Vegas will do the job for us.

Ken Loyd
Team 64

[IMDWalrus]

I dislike the idea also....Id prefer that FIRST does not become the BCS. If that were to happen, we would all be in trouble. :p
We've already got teams sharing the championship...that's close enough to the BCS for me. :)

Just to clarify: teams sharing the championship is NOT a bad thing...I just don't want to get any closer to the BCS.

[Dan Richardson]

Even tho I believe that FIRST isn't firstly about who wins and loses.. I think its still a great idea.

Last year there were many times when I felt.. well how did we seed in national standings, how good was our bot comparitively. Finishing 3rd in our regional, and many of the people in our regional going to their repsective national division finals I still wonder today where we would come in a national rank.

The system would be a deffinate task to develop, but as for the math and lagistics I would help all I could to come up with an effective poll basis. It would be considerably harder than the BCS because strength of schedule pre-rankings and such would be considerably tough to do unless you baised them purely on how each team finished last year, and rookies would be thrown into the bottom purely by number.

Even tho I believe is should have no official bearing it still would be fun to do.

Because even tho its not all about winning and losing, there isn't a single person out there I can think of that hasn't wondered where they actually faired. Especially those who just missed the cut by a point or 2, and they feel that they could have actually done against the nation. It wouldn't be perfect, but nothing is...

We have a ventures system, why not start creating the odds

Dan

[Joe Ross]

I like this idea for one reason. It gives us one more things to discuss. People know that polls aren't fair (that's why we got the BCS). However, they are interesting. If done every week, we would get the chance to see how people's thoughts about robots change over the season. Last year, my team (73) competed at Cleveland, the first week of regionals. We were the best stacker to compete that week, and a lot of people talked about us. Then the next week Moe competed, and a lot of people talked about Moe and compared Moe to us. Then week 3 and after, nobody talked about us. Was that because everyone forgot about us, or because we weren't nearly as good as the robots revealed in week 3 and after? When you are redoing the rankings each week, you are forced to think about robots that competed before, and whether the new robots are better or worse.

As far as it being a popularity contest, it would be. But so are these forums. However, by makingpeople to quantify whos better then who, it will cause people to think about why. Are they better because they won nationals last year, or because they won the GLR regional but no one's heard of them? I know if I see a team in the poll that i'm not familier with, I'm definetly going to try to find out more information about them. As long as you get enough people from each region voting, most regional bias will be evened out. The only bias remaining is the chiefdelphi bias (teams with a presence on chiefdelphi more popular than teams that don't). However, we have that bias anyways, and like I said before, by forcing people to quantify a reason, some fo that bias may disappear.

Here are a few suggestions I have based on the original post, though.

First of all, top 3 teams is way to small for a contest with 800 teams. I'd go for top 15. College football has the top 25 for 117 teams and college basketball has the top 25 for 260 something teams. The fact that you are thinking about categories is good, but we definetly need more then 3.

I'd also not limit it to vetran teams. Rookie teams have much different perspectives and their votes should be factored in as well.

As far as categories, I'd go for something along the lines of the following: Best Small Ball, Best Big Ball, Best Hanging, Best Overall, Best Rookie, and Team You Would Be Most Likely to Pick.

PS. There was only 1 real college football champion. USC! ;)

[Chris Hibner]

I agree with Joe - this would be a lot of fun and it would make for some great discussions. I also agree that it won't be fair, but it would be fun enough to make up for it's lack of fairness (that's my opionion anyway).

Personally, I think we should try it for a season, see how it goes, and then decide if it was a good thing or not. It might be great or it might totally stink, but we'll never know until we try it.

[kevinw]

Any poll system will be unfair. It will have bias. There will be discrepancies (see BCS).

That being said, I agree that it would add to the topics being discussed, and I would enjoy it, knowing full well the problems with polls.