While i generally applaud folks that do the math, with 2400 teams and numbers well into 4,300+, there is nearly a 50% total attrition rate in FRC. The probability of a team winning the 2010 championship when they were a one year wonder in 2008 is 0%...
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Quote:
Originally Posted by lemiant
FIRST is H-A-R-D!!! And to compete with the best your going to need comparable resources.
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Let me fix that for you...
FIRST is H-A-R-D!!! And to
beat the best often, your going to need comparable resources
or a bit of luck.
Often times, the #1 alliance is the winner of the event. The #1 alliance (especially when it wins) is generally comprised with the 2 best robots in the division and then the 20th to 28th best (2nd round pick). If you want to repeatably
beat the best, you must be around the top 4 at an event which is generally the area filled by the high resource teams. At many events, the 2nd round pick by the number 1 alliance is around the 50%-tile for the event. So, to
compete with the best at a regional, you generally need to be top 20-ish of 40-60 teams, and for the world championship top 20-ish of 80-90 teams. This is easily achieveable for most teams with some organization and preparation, and delivering on relatively modest performance goals.
Per comments above, 27, 33, 1718 and approximately
300 (6-10 slots x 50+ events) others fall into a category of being really good but generally not the top 2-3 teams at any given event. When you are around the 3-10th best team at an event, you will more than likely fall into a valley of making elims, but not in an alliance strong enough to win. I would still consider this competing with those amazing teams, though not being able to beat them on most occasions. Within those 300 teams, you will find hundreds of examples of teams with significantly less resources maximizing their potential through benchmarking, smart design, hard work, and determination. Every year on Einstein, you will find teams that many might consider "lucky" for getting picked by 2 other awesome teams. More often, these teams have made their luck by performing really well and putting themselves into a position to "be lucky".
Notice, I mentioned 300 teams above. That leaves about 2100 other teams within FRC. Many of those are young teams some of which are over their heads and/or don't know what to do. A significant chunk though are teams that have the resources to be the 2nd round pick, but instead over-reach or are underprepared. There are a host of relatively young teams doing well year after year by coming up with good reasonable goals that challenge them, and then executing on those goals. While I do not know many of them outside of michigan, I can tell you 1718, 1918, 2054, 2137, 2337, 2612, 2619 2834, and 3098 have been steadily improving the last several years and have been beating many a vetran team. There are a large handful of other young teams that have shown a lot of promise but it takes more than 1 year to see how consistent they are going to be.
Of the 9 teams above, I could go on for probably an hour or more on how impressed I am with those teams
executing their plans. The more informed will also note that the above teams not only are competitive on the field, but have also won business, website, Chairman's, and rookie-allstar awards. Some of them have even fostered a rookie team themselves (with the rookies being aprt of the handful I am watching/looking out for). These are teams that are operating at or near the highest levels of what FIRST is trying to achieve.
If you are only paying attention to the 12 teams making it to Einstein, then you are missing 99.5% (2400-12)/2400 of what FIRST is really about. It is really humbling to compare yourself to those guys. If you start focusing in on the success of the 300 I mentioned above you will find a lot of teams that regard their season successful without having to measure it against other teams success. You will find many improvements your team can make with little or no cost to your team towards becoming one of those 300 (hopefully this number will get larger).
Back on topic:
You will also find a lot of the 300 are teams with practice bots (who spent the $2-3K on making a practice bot instead of flying everyone to XYZ), or maybe they rebuilt their 2011 bot to be like one of the other teams they admire. Or maybe they made serious robustness improvements and competed at some off-season evnts for $100 or... maybe your team will talk with them at your next event and find some of the things they are doing right that you can do and then instead of debating the morality of in-equalities of FRC we can talk about how 4XXX learned a ton from team 2XXX in 2012 and is now kicking bot in 2013...