[Jon Stratis]

All the analysis in the world won't give you a guarantee of who would have won. Let me give you a real-world FIRST example from Logomotion.

Last year at North Star, things did not go as people expected. We were the 7th seeded alliance, but we've been there before, and through good team work made it to the finals against the "super alliance". If you looked at all the video footage leading up to that, there would be no doubt in your mind who would win that match, and by a large margin. The first one went as expected, and we lost. The second one we did even worse, and they did just as well... but the super alliance made a mistake and got a red card (two red cards for two different mistakes, actually). That was something no one could have predicted, and was something that alliance hadn't done leading up to that point. So we go into the third match with lifted spirits and an air of determination... only to see our elevator break during autonomous. Our drive team didn't give up, and went on the defensive instead - the first time they played defense across 2 regionals. We ended up winning that match by only a couple of points, and the regional. Who would have predicted it?

So, since those regional finals went against what all prediction and analysis of prior matches would have expected, should we recognize those teams like you want to recognize those from Einstein this year? If you doubt my analysis, Just look up videos from North Star in 2011 and do your own.

FIRST matches are not deterministic. Robot performance is (sadly) not a constant, and neither is drive team or human player performance. Take a look at the NCAA Basketball tournament for a good analogy. Millions of people every year make their picks and enter them into pools... and millions of people every year are wrong. Even the experts on TV are wrong every year. Not necessarily about everything, but wrong about a significant number of outcomes of games.