Strongest regional competitions
 

alright all your data people. What do you feel are the top 20 strongest / toughest regional competitions .. what are the weakest

Re: Strongest regional competitions
 

Re: Strongest regional competitions
 

I don't think BBQ is a very good stat to use to measure strength of a regional. Blue Banners can be won as being a 3rd robot. (2815 famously won 2 in a year as the 3rd robot). I think a combination of OPR, consistency of performance, and the event's scores compared to the mean (or median) of the entire season would shine more light on which regional would be more competitive.

Also off the top of my head, some regionals with good rosters:

Arkansas
Dallas
Silicon Valley

Re: Strongest regional competitions
 

Since these threads discussing "most competitive" or "strongest" or "toughest" events are inquiring about robot performance and BBQ or Sauce has been pointed to as the appropriate performance metric I have been curious as to why a judged award (Chairman's) should be included in the conversation. I think it would be more insightful to examine the data for event champions/winners normalized like a batting average for the number of events entered in a team's history.

Re: Strongest regional competitions
 

I can't remember a week one as loaded as Dallas is this year...everyone has their work cut out for them for sure.

Re: Strongest regional competitions
 

Finger Lakes.

Not the most star studded of line-ups but every single team is solid. 1511, 340, 229, 191, 1507, 1126.... Feel free to add on to this, the Rochester area is incredible.

Most notable moment: 1 tube hang or minibot away from beating 2056/217 in 2011.

Re: Strongest regional competitions
 

To account for competitiveness in terms of the robot competition alone (no other awards), I propose a new ranking system : WORldS last yEar ranking, or WORSE. (I really wanted that acronym.)

Since comparing teams relevant to their region is generally not going to tell you which region is strongest, we can instead use the ranking of the teams at the last world championships. Each team that attended worlds is given a score equivalent to (100- division ranking from last year).

This isn't perfect as great teams can miss worlds and, as we all know, the rankings can be messed up - but I think it'll work better than BBQ.

Anyone with access to the data and better computer skills than me want to try it?

Re: Strongest regional competitions
 

Interesting idea. Although, since a regional only sends about 6 teams to CMP each year, it may not be as representative of the entire regional as BBQ (not saying that BBQ is the best metric by any means). The finalists, for example, would have no effect on this system, because they didn't attend champs, even if they lost by a single point. Also, teams who don't regularly attend specific out of state events may skew the rankings in certain regionals.

Personally, I want to see some kind of standardized z-score system that takes last year's OPRs of events and compares them with the mean score of that week of competition. Of course, all the qualms of OPR would apply, but I think it's a little more numerical and detailed compared to BBQ, and takes rankings to a minimal factor.

Re: Strongest regional competitions
 

Maybe we should use a standardized OPR, where we give teams an OPR percentage per year, based on their OPR divided by the max OPR for the season/week. We can average the percentages out to give a quantitative estimate of how well one team does against the other teams that year. This should also account for teams that do abnormally good/bad.

I feel like WORSE and BBQ won't give a representative ranking, because, like mentioned, teams who almost won will be ignored.

Re: Strongest regional competitions
 

I humbly submit to you the past two years of Lone Star Regional compared to Dallas this year...

LSR 2013 LSR 2014 Dallas 2015

57 57 57
118 118 118
148 148 148
192 231 457
231 418 624
418 441 647
441 457 704
457 624 932
624 653 987

Above are the oldest ten teams listed from each regional. They have much in common (simply a side-by-side comparison in Excel). Been there to play with them. Makes for an exciting competition no matter what week it occurs :yikes:

P.S. Sorry for the lousy formatting. Couldn't get it to space out for easier reading.

Re: Strongest regional competitions
 

MAR Hatboro-Horsham looks to once again be stacked, with a lineup that includes all previous MAR champions, a few of which have made mutliple Einstein appearances in the last few years, and a good number of MAR's biggest players

Re: Strongest regional competitions
 

This is an interesting topic that can be filled with a lot of opinion. :)
To look at a team’s previous rankings is a start, but one must know the game before you can say the competition will be harder at one location rather than another. Also looking at an overall OPR ranking, is not always a complete understanding of a team. How many members graduated, how strong their student base is, did they lose/gain any mentors that would affect the team. All of these are determining factors in the overall strength of a particular team. :confused:
Also, remember that if you look at the competition level of a team that attends multiple events, that team gets better, so an event later in the year, with many teams that have already competed will likely be a harder event. An example of that is to look at previous years Alamo and Lonestar events. Of these competitions many of the same teams compete, it doesn’t matter which was earlier than the other, the second event is a tougher event. There are many pairs of events similar to this example around the country. ::rtm::
I love that everyone is already looking at the competition, but without knowing the game it is a difficult call. If the game is something that no one has seen, how can you tell how a team will do? Maybe a Rooky Team will step up and design the ultimate robot that can accomplish everything the game allows….there are a lot of unknowns at this time and until everyone has competed in this year’s game who knows.
:eek:

Re: Strongest regional competitions
 

You've just described what I hate the most about the great sport of college football: pre-season rankings. In the world of college football, media outlets try to assign rankings before the season starts to generate hype, the media $$$, and show their perceptions of which teams are strong. Most of the times, the end of year rankings are completely different from the preseason rankings.

While i expect most FRC teams to be more stable than college football programs, all we can do before these regionals play is the same thing the media does before the college football teams play: Speculate, hype, and try to use previous year's stats to justify our predictions.

However, i'd say FRC can be more predictable than football 9 times out of 10 ;)

Re: Strongest regional competitions
 

AP Poll Preseason top 5 teams:
Florida State
Alabama
Oregon
Oklahoma
Ohio State

AP Poll Week 16 top 5 teams:
Alabama
Florida State
Oregon
Baylor
Ohio State

So the AP Poll went from Oklahoma being #4 to unranked, but other than that, the preseason polls seemed to do a pretty decent job. Four of the preseason top five were still in the top five at the end.

So sure, you can't account for every factor (like student, mentor and sponsor loss), but preseason predictions can still do a fairly decent job. Good teams tend to be good from year to year. What are the chances that every team at a regional will be worse than the year before? Pretty slim. Some teams will get worse, but others will get better.


The Waterloo regional will be one of the more competitive ones next year. Only two of the teams attending were not in eliminations at any event last year.

EDIT: I decided to expand on the method of ranking events by % of teams in elims at their first event the previous year. It is slated more to areas with smaller event sizes the previous year (like PNW). This probably makes it a poor indicator of regional competitiveness. However, it still gives insights, especially within areas of similar event sizes. For example, Hatboro is ranked much higher than other MAR districts.
Here are the results:

Re: Strongest regional competitions
 

I don't think anybody is trying to look at the future in a fatalistic way. It's just fun to look at the different events and see how they compare. Any way of doing it has significant flaws, but it's still a fun exercise for some people.