Re: Wild Card 2013
 

The 2 improvements to the system I'd like to see is that any team pre qualified for any reason earning an additional slot at cmp opens a wildcard, and more teams for the wildcards to go to... like maybe highest seed not already qualified or something.

Re: Wild Card 2013
 

While this would be awesome, I don't anticipate this will be the case for the near future. The current wild card system seems to be a way to allow some additional teams to enter the championship without causing a truly massive championship to occur.

Currently, the number of qualification spots break down as follows

58 Regionals x 6 spots per regional = 348 qualification spots for regional qualifiers

FIRST in Michigan = 27 spots

MAR = 14 spots

20 Hall of Fame (National Chairman's Winners)

7 Original and Sustaining Teams (Extant from 1992-Present)

1 Engineering Inspiration Winner from 2012 (congratulations 1629!)

3 Championship Winners from 2012 (expanded to all 12 for 2013 due to Einstein issues)

If you add this up, you get a 420 team Championship (429 this year due to Einstein).

You can now see why there was no pre-registration this year, it would simply not be feasible to allow any more than those who are qualified to attend.

Three years ago, FIRST made a push to ensure that each team got 10 matches at Championship. The solution to this was to cut practice day in half and begin qualifications on Thursday. Last year, with 100 team divisions, the schedule was mostly unchanged, but teams played nine matches. Assuming teams still get 9 matches, increasing to 105 team divisions (420/4 = 105) gives you an additional 8 matches to play, or about 50 minutes of additional play time, something that would be hard to find in the schedule.

This leads me to believe that FIRST does NOT want the Championship to grow any larger. This does not take into account the other issues involved with a larger Championship, such as more pit space, more crates to ship with FedEx, more robots to inspect etc.

So, if you assume that there are some percentage of teams that will not attend the CMP despite being qualified (for example, the HoF teams that are no longer in existence, lack of funding/will/school support for qualified teams), and there are a limited number of teams that will qualify more than once and do NOT generate a wild card spot with the current system, you might be able to get back down to a sub-400 team championship.

As I write this post, the championship has 114 registered teams. I am going to assume that not too many teams that qualified this weekend have signed up at this time. We still have weeks 4-6 to play, as well as the MSC and MAR Championship (which nearly guarantee an additional 41 registrants).

Simply allowing the championship to fill to its mathematical capacity every year is not going to work out anymore, especially because FIRST continues to grow and more regionals/teams are added every year. Sooner or later, the CMP is going to have to grow by a significant amount to bring us back to the "old days," or we are going to have to accept that only those who are good enough to win (whether it be for on field or off field accomplishments) get to go to Championship. Does this mean that deserving teams will be left on the outside? Sadly, this will be the case.

Re: Wild Card 2013
 

Sorry, pet peeve invoked. You misspelled "World" or possibly "Championship". The US no longer has a lock on CCAs (not that we should have claimed it before last year anyway). :)

Re: Wild Card 2013
 

Glad to see you read my post with a keen eye! Yeah, I come from a time in FIRST where it was all "Nationals." While the Championship was called CMP by 2003, all of my mentors still called it Nationals, and it stuck.

Re: Wild Card 2013
 

And you forgot about the few teams from Einstein last year that got automatic bids to this year's champs that donnt fit into the pre-qualifying spots.

Re: Wild Card 2013
 

What I am unclear on (as far as I could tell, it did not specify this).

Does a pre-qualifying team that wins a regional qualify for championship due to their regional win or their pre-qualification.

If they qualify because of their regional win, they open a wild card spot. But if their pre-qualification is how they qualified (this makes more sense as many pre-qualified teams already registered for Championship), wouldn't that mean that they did not qualify for Championship during the 2013 season and therefore do not open a wild card spot?

If the way I am reading it is true, the following teams would not open wildcard slots regardless of any regional wins:
16, 20, 23, 25, 45, 51, 67, 103, 111, 118, 120, 126, 148, 175, 190, 191, 207, 233, 236, 254, 341, 365, 359, 548, 842, 987, 1114, 1629, 2056, 2194, 4334

Is this right? Does a team "qualifying" at a previous event mean "qualifying for the first team" or does duplicate qualifications not count (such as pre-qualifying)

Re: Wild Card 2013
 

This is addressed in the wild card rules. Pre-qualified teams like HoF or 2012 Einstein teams don't generate a wild card opportunity until they qualify at a 2013 event. There's nothing that I saw that says that teams qualifying 3 times this year (crosses fingers) don't generate wild card opportunities at both the 2nd & 3rd events.

In other words -- the Bomb Squad has to win their 3rd regional (they didn't qualify for CMP at Hub City) after qualifying at their 2nd in order to generate a wild card opportunity. 2056 & 1114 would generate wild card slots if they win another tournament, but they didn't for winning GTE.

Re: Wild Card 2013
 

Pet Peeve invoked...you mispelled TEAMS--"temas" Mr. Jaxom.:)

Just giving you a hard time.

Re: Wild Card 2013
 

To attend the Championship, teams must qualify at least once in any way. To generate wild card spots, teams must first "post-qualify," which can only occur at an event in the current season. Jaxom explained above in greater detail, but this is the gist of it.

Re: Wild Card 2013
 

Let me be clear: I don't believe we should go back to the days of open registration for Championship. Championship should be the domain of those who earned the right to be there, either on the field or off it.

I don't believe that a team earning the right to be there multiple times should be able to reduce the number of teams a region sends. A region should send its N best candidates, where N is proportional to the teams in a region. This is clearly shown comparing FiM's 27 to MAR's 14. FiM has more teams, so they qualify more teams. Simple. Logical. Its difficult to apply this to the regional model though. In Canada, we have 3 regionals in Ontario within 2 hours drive of one another, and many Canadian teams attend 2 or 3 of them.
MI has 207 teams for 2013, and they're qualifying 27, or 13%. There are 73 Ontario teams in 2013, and 18 potential slots, or 25%. I suspect the ideal ratio is somewhere in the middle, and that Ontario has more potential slots than it should based on its density.

I DO believe that the only way to make Championships a sustainable thing as the program continues to grow and add more and more regional events is to convert most of the program to the district model as densities allow. Regions should only qualify a number of teams proportional to the number of teams in the region. This gets messy with regionals as they exist in their current form, because they are non-exclusive sets of teams. This results in teams that compete in multiple places earning multiple slots with no easy answer of who to pass the extra seats on to. The FiM and MAR scenario is working with an explicit set of teams, so it is easy to create a system in which nobody can earn multiple slots to CMP, they simply pass an extra to the next available candidate (ie. if 33 wins a MSC CA, AND qualifies for CMP on points, their points seat just goes to the next highest number of points).

Using Canada as an example: Canada now has 5 regionals. 3 in Ontario (ONTO, ONTO2, and ONWA), 1 in Quebec (QCMO), and 1 in Alberta (ABCA). These 5 should theoretically send 30 teams to CMP. The reality of the situation is that 1114 and 2056 have each historically eaten up 2-4 of these 30 slots on their own. In 2013, 1114 and 2056 are both attending all three Ontario regionals. In the District model, they would not be earning multiple slots, and so, more Canadian teams that are deserving would get to go to CMP on a more consistent basis. Teams like 1310, 1241, 610, 188, 772, 1305, and more. These teams often miss out on CMP slots, leaving representation at CMP a bit odd with 1114 and 2056, plus whoever could win an RCA or EI, plus a few "24th best" teams. The district model adds an extra layer of filtering to that, and thus the 27 MI teams that go to CMP are usually higher caliber. I see this as a good thing. CMP should really be the battle of the best. MSC and MAR Championships are seen as high-strength events, and that is owing to the invitation-only nature of them. They are good vehicles for sending the best teams from their region to Championship.

If FIRST were to make Canada a district model region, I would say that they should keep ONTO2 (GTRWest, Hershey Center Mississauga) as the "Canadian Regional Championship", and convert the others to Districts (possibly by changing their venues, but still keeping the general locations the same), while adding a few additional districts, like perhaps Niagara area, Windsor/Sarnia area, and maybe a Northern Ontario district in Sudbury. One in Quebec City might make sense as growth continues in Quebec. It would probably make sense to leave Western Canada out of this hypothetical region due to geography making logistics difficult.

Re: Wild Card 2013
 

My question is, why does it have to be after. Team Titanium has won 2 regionals so far, so why is it the teams that lose to 1986 in their 2nd regional victory gets a reward? Why don't the teams that lost to them in their 1st regional get a wildcard slot?

Re: Wild Card 2013
 

I guess the reasoning behind the "after" part is because they might think that more often than not the first set of teams will have another chance at getting in to champs.

Re: Wild Card 2013
 

Because 1986 had to earn their first slot, and they did so by winning at Hub City.

The second slot 1986 won got passed on to the team who would have won it if 1986 lost there. Makes sense.

Re: Wild Card 2013
 

Sorry. :o

It wold not have mattered in Hub though. Bomb Squad would have been offered the wild card, and even though they are qualified as an HOF team and as World Champions they still would not have been able to pass on the Wild Card spot to their first pick.

http://www.usfirst.org/roboticsprogr...ility-criteria

This seems like one more reason for teams to avoid week 1 regionals.

Good Luck in Alamo. There are several great teams coming in looking for a bid to Champs, you guys included.

Re: Wild Card 2013
 

It makes sense to make Championship a battle of the best ,but there is also something to be said for the opportunity for some of the more average teams to have the ability to attend championship. Sure it makes sense in a traditional competition for the championship to only involve the best teams, but this is also FIRST -- it's about the students and inspiration. Championship is the most inspiring event that a high school student interested in STEM careers could attend. Attending this event as a competitor, even if your robot does not dominate, can have a huge impact on students on less developed teams.

I have never been to championship, as my team is still growing. Because St. Louis is relatively near, and I have a brother in St. Louis, I am attending Championship as a volunteer in order to experience such an inspirational event.

An alliances second pick or backup team getting a spot may seem to take a championship spot of a better team, but it also gives students on less fortunate teams that same opportunity to be inspired. Students on an average team that attend championship could use that inspiration to grow and become an even stronger team. The luck factor in being an average team as second pick plays a subtle role in helping teams grow.

With that said, I definitely agree that the current structure leaves many deserving teams out of championship. Perhaps an in-between solution would be necessary.