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Unread 02-02-2011, 10:38
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AKA: Patrick Freivald
FRC #1551 (The Grapes of Wrath)
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Join Date: Jan 2007
Rookie Year: 2001
Location: Naples, NY
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Re: toughest regional in 2011?

Quote:
Originally Posted by pandamonium View Post
IMO this whole blue banner thing is a wash. What if teams don't submit chairman's at that regional? In general I feel that FLR is undervalued, I am not saying that it is the best. Beeing week one hurts the competition in general. a large # of teams also going to the Rochester Rally preseason event counters this and helps it seem less like a week 1.
2009 saw the worst-performing robot that 1551 has ever put together. Neat design, just didn't play the game for squat.

2010 saw us picking 217 and 174 to join us in the top-seeded alliance.

So now we have a blue banner, but I don't think we're a fundamentally different team than we were in the past. We nailed the strategy for last year's game (though not as well as 469), and built a robot that excelled at enacting that strategy (at least on the first-week regional level... it kinda took a beating and decided to fall apart repeatedly at Championship). Yet there were other teams there that consistently do very well that last year were not all that impressive on the field.

My point being that the BBQ might not be all it's SAUCEd up to be -- sometimes teams are very surprising in both good and bad ways. Some teams are consistently awesome every year, teams to look up to and to aspire to be. Some teams are consistently middle-of-the-road in terms of robot performance, but can break out and do great things or break down and do poorly (on the field) in one particular game.

A further reason that BBQ might be skewed is that a single robot winning multiple regionals in one year can net a team multiple Blue Banners, while a team that has a robot as good or better that only wins one regional gets only one Blue Banner. Being tournament champions four times in one year, methinks, means a lot less than being tournament champions once for four separate years.

It's an interesting metric, but I'm not sure it's a good one for determining regional difficulty... And that's ignoring the fact that the number of data points are so small that if you tried to do any meaningful statistics on them, you'd get GIGO.
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Team 1551
"The Grapes of Wrath"
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