Quote:
Originally Posted by dodar
Then Michigan teams should go to OOS regionals and win those to get in.
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That's not really a logical answer. Michigan and MAR already have a very good to excellent method for ranking teams. Two qualifying events (24 qualification matches and eliminations) that feed into a region championship. Telling teams to spend the time and money to go to another event isn't the easy answer.
We were one of the (18?) teams that attended 5 events last year, and it was draining. Two MAR districts, Montreal, MAR CMP, and World CMP. That was $18,000 in registration alone. Thanks to our hard work, excellent sponsors, and school district we were able to manage that, but we're not the norm in that regard. We could have skipped MAR CMP since we won at Montreal, but had we not been lucky in that regard it's a mandatory 4 events before you can qualify for CMP.
You can also be an excellent team and not manage to get lucky enough to win a regional. Look at 118 this year, they had to win their 3rd and final regional to get a bid for CMP, and they were easily one of the top 10 robots in FIRST.
The easy solution is to adjust the number of bids to be proportional to the number to teams as a region grows. Michigan and MAR are the guinea pigs here, and it's tricky since everyone else is still in the regional system. I think the intent was to keep the same number of slots as there were in the regional system, so MAR got 12 as Philadelphia and NJ were dropped in the transition to MAR. MAR grew by 10 teams this year (99 to 109), so we now have 1 CMP slot for every ~9.1 teams. Michigan has 1 CMP slot for every ~11.4 teams (18 for 206 teams).
It's not a direct comparison, but California is close to Michigan in size (216 teams), and has 6 Regional events. No idea about waitlists, but right now those 6 events have 320 teams registered, or 1 slot for every 8.9 teams competing (53 team/event average). Competing in Michigan is roughly equivalent to attending a 68 team regional, with teams that are significantly better than average.