Fouls and Tiebreakers
 

There's been a lot of talk about the final Einstein match, where the win was swept up by the 1st Tiebreaker level: foul points. As a lover of stats, I decided to run an analysis and see how common this was throughout the season. I've split foul-decided matches into two categories:

The first type (Tie) is a match where the ending scores are tied, and the 1st tiebreaker is used to determine the winner (i.e. both alliances score the same, but the alliance creating the least fouls wins)

The second type (Sway) describes a match where fouls 'sway' the final score of the match (i.e. red scores 100, blue scores 97, but red got 5 points due to a blue foul. If this foul didn't occur, blue would have won, hence 'swaying' the match)

Let's take a look, starting off at the Top.

Einstein Field
Ties: 1 (Finals 1 Match 3)
Sways: 3 (Quarters 1 Match 1, Semis 1 Match 1, Semis 1 Match 2)
Total: 4 foul-decided matches

Championship Divisions
Ties: 8 (Arch: 2, Carson: 1, Curie: 3, Galileo: 1, Hopper: 1)
Sways: 46 (Arch: 9, Carson: 5, Carver: 8, Curie: 3, Galileo: 5, Hopper: 2, Newton: 9, Tesla: 5)
Total: 54 foul-decided matches

Season Events
Ties: 87
Sways: 587
Total: 674 foul-decided matches

Thoughts?

Re: Fouls and Tiebreakers
 

To give an idea of perspective, there were a total of 13302 matches this season, meaning 5.06% of all matches this year were decided by foul points (0.65% as Tiebreakers, 4.4% as Sways)

Re: Fouls and Tiebreakers
 

You might want to include Red Cards as their own category--that's a Sway, only more devastating. I'm not sure they currently are counted.

Easiest way to find 'em is to find elims matches where an alliance scored zero points. That alliance got a red card and thus lost the match.

The Disable fouls (usually, somebody's bumper fell off) decided some playoff matches, too, but nowhere near as many as red cards.

Re: Fouls and Tiebreakers
 

Red cards aren't currently counted.
The easiest way to get them is actually to take the total points, add the adjustments (negative for red cards) and check if it's zero. If I recall, there was a match this season where an alliance scored 0 points without a red card or any penalties.

If you include red cards only, there were 18 matches where the alliance that got the red card would have won if not for the red card. 4 of those were in Champs Divisions (Newton, Carson, Carver, Galileo with 1 each), and 0 on Einstein.

Unfortunately I can't detect disable fouls, as the match score breakdown doesn't specify what the fouls were for, nor if any robots were disabled in the match.

Re: Fouls and Tiebreakers
 

For the season events is that only for Playoffs?

If not, do you know the number of ties in Playoffs only? It would be interesting to see how many matches would have been replayed if there weren't any tie breakers.

Re: Fouls and Tiebreakers
 

It's qualifications and playoffs.
If you include only playoff matches, there were 109 matches decided by fouls, 18 of which were ties, and 91 were sways

Re: Fouls and Tiebreakers
 

Here's all the zero-score playoff matches.

Re: Fouls and Tiebreakers
 

In qual matches, ties remain ties. So I do believe the important thing is that 18 playoff matches were decided by tie. (OK, including the final one...)

Re: Fouls and Tiebreakers
 

Good call, I missed that part

Re: Fouls and Tiebreakers
 

That's interesting - if playoff ties were to be decided by a third match, that would be another 18 matches this season, or 45 total minutes of game play. Not that anyone isn't really against it already, but data seems to show that the current playoff tiebreaker rules aren't worth keeping.

Re: Fouls and Tiebreakers
 

I would say that they are worth keeping.

However, that is IF the game doesn't lend itself to ties, which can be extremely hard to predict before the season. 2010 was notorious for its ties (and the low scores compared to most years). 2011-2015, not so much. 2016 was close enough to possibly want it, but I think it was unnecessary. 2017, who knows?

Re: Fouls and Tiebreakers
 

I think you're both right, for eliminations play a 4th rubber match, AND have a tiebreaker in that 4th match only. (This prevents problems of never-ending eliminations.) But the rules for the tiebreaker have to be non-subjective - ie, not based on fouls.

And in case someone wants to bring up schedule pressure, while a valid point, remember FIRST calls FRC "the ultimate Sport for the Mind." Virtually no sporting events have a hard, fixed schedule that dictates what time the event ends. The game ends, when the game ends. I bet if after Einstein F3 they called a tie and a 4th match the crowd would have gone just as nuts to see that 4th match as they did for the champs being crowned.

Re: Fouls and Tiebreakers
 

How many equal-score playoff matches were decided by tiebreaker sort order > 1st? (Not by fouls.)

I know of one that was decided by the 4th order sort. Were any decided by sort order > 4th?

Re: Fouls and Tiebreakers
 

The highest sort order we've reached is 4th. That was achieved by 3 matches:
NE District - UMass-Dartmouth Event - Semis 1 Match 2
Michigan State Championship - Eights 2 Match 2
FIM District - Standish-Sterling Event - Quarters 4 Match 1

Re: Fouls and Tiebreakers
 

On a slightly unrelated, but still interesting note:
There have been 311 instances where an alliance Tower has ended with a higher strength than what it started with due to Tech Fouls (>8 for Events, >10 for Championships)