[Ed Law]

Jacob,

I have seen studies done with several years of data that shows the average OPR increasing as time goes on so I would be careful in saying one regional/district is stronger than another if they are not in the same week.

Take our team as an example. Our week 1 event OPR was 5.9 because the robot was not working properly. Our week 2 event OPR was 32.5 because the robot was working and we also got the minibot to work half way through the event.

For teams that do not have a practice robot to practice after ship date, their OPR usually improves as drivers get more experience. There can be many other reasons teams improve their OPR from one event to the next. Most teams plateau out after their 3rd event. Of course some teams' OPR goes down as their robot wore out and start to break down.

One difference between powerhouse teams and teams like ours is they start their season with very high OPR probably because they have less things to "debug". For us we still have a lot of things to learn. We have a lot of "first" this year. First time using banebot motor, first time using gyro, first time using potentiometer, first time using Mecanum wheels and programming it, first time programming a field oriented drive, first time designing and building a 4 bar link arm, first time trying a magnetic encoder, first time trying a compass sensor. We are very lucky to have Team 33 helping us but when you are doing so many things for the first time, bad things are going to happen.