FRC Top 25 week 3 results
 

What are your thoughts on the week 3 rankings? Any comments about teams, or any teams you think should be higher or lower?

Re: FRC Top 25 week 3 results
 

Wow. Week 1 we were the #7, two weeks later...off the list. I bet success in our week 6 regional will be a bit late in the season to make up for being out of sight for five weeks.

Re: FRC Top 25 week 3 results
 

I can certainly empathize with you... we also won a regional (I believe you were #1 seed, we were #3 pick), ranked well the first week (and pretty well the second week), but have since fallen off the list. To be honest though, I was hardly surprised. I think there are two things going on to make the top teams from Week 1 fall off the list, both of which really aren't surprising but should be remembered:

First - and more significantly - there are simply more teams in the "pool" to be voted for. To add on to that Week 1 is even a "smaller week," meaning more than just twice as many teams have since competed. 298 teams competed in Week 1. 1,249 *different* teams have competed in the first three weeks. Basically, only the top 5 teams from Week 1 should have remained on the list, assuming normal distribution. In Week 1, ~8% of 298 competing teams were on the list... by the end of Week 6, ~1.2% of 2,076 teams will be on the list. You don't need me to tell you what that means.

Second, there definitely is some of that "out of sight, out of mind" among this. We're voting, spending a while compiling our lists, trying to keep track of 1,249 teams, and none of that is all too systematic. We'll remember more of the top scorers from Weeks 2 and 3 than from Week 1.

I think it's quite likely 1676 will make the list again, particularly assuming you guys continue to improve! We'll also be competing later (Week 5) and hope to show off our improvements, potentially earning a position back on the list. Best of luck to Pascack this year - you guys are certainly becoming a household number! :-)

To give my impressions on the list... Wow!! That certainly is one list of top-notch teams! As the countdown was continuing, I did often think "man, I thought they'd be higher than that!" but afterwards, I couldn't have said where I'd move that team to! Putting the teams together into such a list is pretty impressive! As always there'll be some bias towards the perennial powerhouses, but every one of those teams is performing at a very high level, no doubt!

Re: FRC Top 25 week 3 results
 

I wouldn't take the results too seriously.

Re: FRC Top 25 week 3 results
 

Aww poor sport.

Ya know, there is already a thread for this? No need to make another one.

Re: FRC Top 25 week 3 results
 

it appears that is just a thread advertising the webcast, and it is not for discussing the results.

Re: FRC Top 25 week 3 results
 

Whats the point of multiple threads though? It's easier to keep track of, if it's all in one place. Just my thoughts.

Re: FRC Top 25 week 3 results
 

Agreed, and the expert polls are even worse than the popular polls. The way teams flip flop and jump around despite not playing and not having common opponents with the teams that move ahead of or behind them is pretty crazy.

Re: FRC Top 25 week 3 results
 

now that the discussions been started here, why don't we keep it here. but for future reference, yes lets stick with the original thread

I'm with you on this, this is a very political poll. Many teams will get overlooked. Don't lose sleep if your one of those teams

For what its worth I'm surprised your off the list too, but at the same moment I'm not. People are very attached to robots not points. So where your team may be as valuable as many of the top 25 teams, much of that comes from your minibot. A perfect example of one of those teams is team 16, who yes went undefeated, and had a strong robot, but I think you should be ranked well above them.

other teams that suffered the same fate are 573 and 836

and look at 1985... great robot and minibot, but didn't make the list (mostly because they competed at st. louis which doesn't seem to be a very followed regional)

I do everything by numbers which there has been quite debate about... but that being said, 1519 would have made my top 40 or 50. many of the top 25 teams had lethal and reliable minibots. Theres a good chance if you minibot goes up and triggers every race at smokey mountain you will become a top 25 team

Re: FRC Top 25 week 3 results
 

Very proud of our students to see us at #21 after the win at Peachtree. I know the south isn't usually considered a powerhouse region, so it's nice to see us get some love. I'm sure that we'll fall out before we compete again at North Carolina, but we'll make improvements in the mean time and hopefully jump back in there before Championships.

Re: FRC Top 25 week 3 results
 

You guys made my top 10 :)
looks like you have an awesome and reliable robot, and a reliable minibot.

Re: FRC Top 25 week 3 results
 

yup, we are looking on making some major changes to our robot thursday of NC. We currently can put up 2 logos and minibot with defense played on us. There were a few matches at peachtree were we almost put up 3 logos( JUST ONE TUBE) but i told our drivers to launch the minibot instead.

Seeing how important shaving seconds is in this game, we hope to acquire tubes faster, hold them tighter, cut our lift time in half, and get our minibot faster.

Re: FRC Top 25 week 3 results
 

IMO, if it comes down to reliability or speed I would stick with reliability. Right now your robot is top notch, get greedy and you may create issues. Sit still for even a match and your top 25 value drops incredibly (ask 2054)

For example cutting your lift time in half sounds good on paper, but could result in dropped tubes. It sounds like a very drastic change to an already awesome robot, but of course you are the only one's who can measure the potential ROI against the risk.

Re: FRC Top 25 week 3 results
 

2415 has a practice bot at home so they can test out changes beforehand. I trust they could make some pretty radical changes without too much detriment.

Having a twin back at home is always nice for trying out new things.

Re: FRC Top 25 week 3 results
 

yes, any and ALL changes will be done on our practice bot and tested throughly. At peachtree...we made some pretty radical changes and it worked out very nicely. We will have our kids trained to make the changes within 2 hours on thursday.

and james, we ow you a BIG one with the girpper!!! thanks!

Re: FRC Top 25 week 3 results
 

The FRC Top 25 list is a lot of fun to watch & it is an honor to be included. However, I don't read too much into it. Being a popular poll, I think people vote for the teams that they know or have some exposure to. The finals at West Michigan last weekend got a lot of attention (including video) on CD. In this week's poll, we moved up, and 27, 67, and 2054 all joined the list. They are all well deserving in my opinion, but if others had gotten the same exposure, they may have gotten the same recognition.

Re: FRC Top 25 week 3 results
 

If you want to complain about the expert polls, consider this: for Week 3, only 4 of the 10 expert voters have a list in. Find the rest of them and have them get lists in before you complain about that.

Re: FRC Top 25 week 3 results
 

I have considered that, and I don't think it makes a difference, I am looking at the "experts" who have updated one at a time. Atleast one of the "experts" seems to have no agreement with the others about what bots are best (4 of his/her to 10 are not in any one elses 25, and he/she did not include 2 teams in his/her 25 that are in every one elses top 10.

There are only 8 teams on all 4 expert lists:
111
1114
148
2056
217
33
330
40

(Any given year I would say at least 7 of these teams would make the top 25)

There is no way that number can go up if more "experts" post. I wouldn't expect every ones lists to match, but the diferences should be in the lower ranked teams. If you look at college sports polls then there is usually consensus between the experts, it is pretty rare to see a team raked #3 by one person and not ranked by any one else.

I don't know who the "experts" are but I have to say I agree with Tom, I would not take the rankings too seriously.

Re: FRC Top 25 week 3 results
 

As an expert (gasp!), I'm not posting because I didn't see any teams not at WPI during week 2, and I didn't see anybody week 3. I feel it's better to post when I at least have a rough idea, instead of no idea.

Re: FRC Top 25 week 3 results
 

I didn't post one particular week because while I had internet before the posting period (and watched several events), I had no internet access during the posting period.

College sports poll comparisons can fail: I wouldn't be surprised if before those lists come out, the experts confer at least a bit and call attention to a missed team. Here, I don't think the experts even know who the other experts are (unless someone comes out and says they're an expert).

Re: FRC Top 25 week 3 results
 

Right, which is why Justin and I started this whole FRC Top 25 thing for FUN. And you're right, it is rare.. but that's because this whole system is based on matter of opinion. In one person's mind XXXX team is the best team out there, but to someone else they're not. It's opinion. It's hard to see every robot in every match of every regional. Rankings are going to be all over the place.

And guys, the public poll is the same exact way! You just can't see how each person voted, as you can in the expert poll. Everyone who votes in the public poll votes differently as well- it's life. No one is paid to make these rankings- like in football. If the experts did this as a full time job like in NCAA, you can bet they would sit down for 8 hours a day analyzing match videos and data to find the best teams; and then I think you would see some more consensus between the voters. But that's not reality.

So everyone just needs to relax, and enjoy the friendly competition this brings. And as Justin said on the show last night, "It's not a matter of finding 25 teams, its a matter of finding which 25 teams." There are so many GREAT robots out there. Soooo many great teams were left off the list. So don't take any of this personal. Just enjoy the spirit it brings to FIRST. It's been so much fun chatting and communicating with all of you, and doing the show, and I hope you guys have enjoyed it! :)

Re: FRC Top 25 week 3 results
 

Something to keep in mind is there are between 100 and 150 NCAA Div. 1 football teams. Picking a top 25 out of that is deciding on the 1/4 to 1/6th best teams. This is just slightly harder than making a pick-list for a FRC Championship Division (a little under 90 teams). Picking a Top 25 out of a current 800-ish teams is picking the top couple of percent. This would be pretty tough. If you think about it, if you and draw a random 25 out of a deck of 100, we will likely have around 6 matching teams. Do the same experiment on a deck of 800, and you are likely to have 1 or fewer matches.

I really appreciate the folks contributing and putting this together. If you have ever made a pick-list at an event, you know how tough it can be trying to sort out teams.
What actually surprises me is that there are not a ton more on the mention list. I figured there would be a fair amount of overlap for the top 10, but the next 15 or so would be much more random thus the mention list would be HUGE.

Re: FRC Top 25 week 3 results
 

I think there's a cutoff. I'm sure there are a few more than listed--there's just a cutoff; if you don't get more points than the cutoff, you don't get listed.

Re: FRC Top 25 week 3 results
 

The mention list could be quite huge if we choose it to be!
For example, this week 111 different teams were at least voted for once. So what Justin and I do is we look at the teams ranked 25 through about 45, and find in our "Totals" column on our spreadsheet where there's a big gap between teams in the 25-45 range. So for this week 201, 245, 359, 1023, 1126, 1503 and 1676 all fell close to the Top 25 (26th-32nd Rank). So the 33rd ranked team after that group of 7 was quite behind in number of votes. If you notice on the website for this week it says "55 Ranking Point Qualifier". So 201, 245, 359, 1023, 1126, 1503 and 1676 all had at least 55 Points). The 33rd ranked team this week had 46 Points. So that's where our steep drop of was this week. Each week the Qualifier number will be different based on the number of voters.
I hope that made sense- it probably didn't though.. If it's not let me know, I can try and clear it up some.

Exactly!

Re: FRC Top 25 week 3 results
 

Understood. What would be neat to see - especially after week 6 - would be a graph of ranking points on the Y axis and rank on the X axis, all the way out to 120 (or however many got 2 or more votes). I'm interested in the places where steep drops occur.

Re: FRC Top 25 week 3 results
 

Have you ever really looked at analysis of all the voters in a major poll? It is full of "extreme voters". For comparison lets look at Week 3 of the AP CFB poll on pollspeak.com (I will admit that I am enough of a college football geek that I do occasionally look at polls, Jeff Sagarin computer rankings and listen to a recruiting podcast)

Let's look at this one team: Auburn. Some voters had them as high as 10 while others had them unranked. How did that turn out for them? BCS Champions. Lets look at one that went the other way: Michigan. Highest 8th Lowest: unranked. Interestingly enough, James Madison University received a few votes as high as 19 after their big upset of VA Tech (then went on to miss the playoffs of the FCS).

So maybe the one extreme voter you mention is the "Scott Wolf" of the group. However, it brings up other issues in the trying to put together a list of Top 25 robots, who has actually seen the #3 robot in question. I was at Chesapeake so I didn't see any of the SAC webcast or any archive vids. All I know is their OPR was 21.064 and lost in the QF, probably not a #3 by those metrics, but I still have no clue what their robot actually does (maybe it ran a successful double Uber and they had hard luck in the #8 Alliance). I would like to see that expert comment on their unique pick and maybe we would learn something. Mike and Justin, is there going to be expert comments added to the website any time soon.

According to the overall OPR list, there have been 1337 non unique robots at 3 weeks worth of events (no I didn't make that # up to be leet). Noone could possibly have processed all of those performances at regionals when trying to make a list of 25, the process is inherently difficult and inaccurate. You can reduce your sample size somewhat by only considering elim alliances, but then you run into a new problem: How do you split the credit among alliance members for the win? At Alamo, 16 went undefeated, 148 put up the double uber, both put up their share of tubes and minibots to dominate the elims, who gets the bigger share of the win pie. The 3 team alliance nature of all recent FIRST games makes it more difficult to evaluate individual robot performance. More archived vids wold help everyone vote better, and it is not as simple as setting your DVR to recored a Sat of College Football or watching highlights on College Football Final. I'm sure Mike an Justin would love to play highlights, but that would take a larger community effort and a longer show.

I'm frankly glad this poll does't reach the "consensus" of the major college polls. As I pointed out before they don't totally reach a consensus, but similarities in their votes are largely due to pressure to conform with other voter's past votes. This starts with the baseless "Preseason Poll", which is all hype loosely related to last year's performance (which is at least the same game unlike FIRST). That Preseason poll gets cemented in future polls as pollsters are reluctant to move anyone down until they lose despite all other evidence to the contrary. FRC Top25 has the rule that you can't vote for someone that hasn't competed to prevent this sort of mentality.

The poll will never be perfect and at this stage it is still new and getting the kinks out. However the poll and the show is fun and that is the point. I need to encourage the scouts on my team that watch webcasts to vote (along with me) in the public poll and join in the fun & community.

Re: FRC Top 25 week 3 results
 

Everyone seems to be in consensus that it is hard if not impossible for people to rank a true top 25 due to the number of team, limited amount of time to view matches, and limited cross over between teams and regions. This is exactly why I said in my two previous posts that I would not take the rankings too seriously. I appreciate the difficulty of scouting large numbers of teams and trying to make a ranking list of the top ~2%, I am not criticizing the people who are trying to do this, simply putting out a warning for those who might not realize that this list is (probably) not accurate that they might not want to put much weight into these rankings.

Re: FRC Top 25 week 3 results
 

Some people take this stuff way too seriously. Just have fun.

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Haha. You got it! We pretty much say that every show. These are people's opinions.. not facts.

Absolutely! That was the whole reason behind the show. Just to have fun and to get people talking about robotics!! The poll is not the "master picklist" to have at Championship. :)

Re: FRC Top 25 week 3 results
 

Thank you for the compliment. The kids had a blast making this robot and just
as much fun competing. As for making polls, we are plenty comfortable just
working under the radar before championship and having fun doing it! That's what it is about.:D

Re: FRC Top 25 week 3 results
 

There are only 10 experts that contribute to the poll and of which only 4 did lists last week? Why are the experts limited to only 10? That seems to be a mighty small sample size to be considered the experts to evaluate teams, especially when not even half are contributing.

Once again...I realize this is all for fun and quite honestly the popular poll would seem to give better results...

Re: FRC Top 25 week 3 results
 

The experts volunteered. That means that only 10 volunteered and actually sent in a list. (I don't know how many volunteered and didn't send in a list yet.) I don't think that 10 is a limit, but a function of willingness to volunteer.

Re: FRC Top 25 week 3 results
 

Define "volunteered". Can my grandmother volunteer to be an expert?

Sarcasm aside, I'm assuming there was some process for approving the experts other than just volunteering services. I believe Looking Forward sent invites for participating in the past top-25 polls.

Re: FRC Top 25 week 3 results
 

I sent out invites as well as posted that anyone interested is welcome to PM me if they wanted to participate as an expert, no one was turned down.

Eric is absolutely right. The fact we "only" have twelve experts was a matter of only getting twelve people to volunteer.

Re: FRC Top 25 week 3 results
 

LF didnt send invites for the expert polls.

Re: FRC Top 25 week 3 results
 

I didn't mean this year's past top-25 polls. I meant for the polls in previous years.

Re: FRC Top 25 week 3 results
 

Got it. Sorry, I missed the "past" part as being prior to this season.