[Cory]

I'm not a big fan of not qualifying the third partner of the winning alliance.

Teams in general can be shockingly bad at picking and you end up with great robots that slip to the tail end of the second round. In general the 24th pick is probably weaker than the 16th, but unless the event is very small it's probably not a massive difference.

For example 254 was able to pick 111 and then 973 as the 23rd robot picked in the draft on Galileo this year. 973 was the MVP of our alliance and 5th on our pick list. We were utterly shocked that we were able to pick them. We would not have won Championships without them.

If that had been a regional and the third pick weren't qualified for champs, that would be a travesty. Obviously that's one extremely specific example and it isn't often that one of the top 8 robots by anyone's metrics falls so far, but we have been lucky enough to have a number of very competitive partners come from the tail end of the draft over the years.