Thread: Wild Card 2013
View Single Post
  #32   Spotlight this post!  
Unread 18-03-2013, 11:34
Francis-134's Avatar
Francis-134 Francis-134 is offline
Lifer
FRC #0190 (Gompei and the Herd)
Team Role: Mentor
 
Join Date: Jan 2003
Rookie Year: 2003
Location: Worcester, MA
Posts: 604
Francis-134 has a reputation beyond reputeFrancis-134 has a reputation beyond reputeFrancis-134 has a reputation beyond reputeFrancis-134 has a reputation beyond reputeFrancis-134 has a reputation beyond reputeFrancis-134 has a reputation beyond reputeFrancis-134 has a reputation beyond reputeFrancis-134 has a reputation beyond reputeFrancis-134 has a reputation beyond reputeFrancis-134 has a reputation beyond reputeFrancis-134 has a reputation beyond repute
Re: Wild Card 2013

Quote:
Originally Posted by Racer26 View Post
The 2 improvements to the system I'd like to see is that any team pre qualified for any reason earning an additional slot at cmp opens a wildcard, and more teams for the wildcards to go to... like maybe highest seed not already qualified or something.
While this would be awesome, I don't anticipate this will be the case for the near future. The current wild card system seems to be a way to allow some additional teams to enter the championship without causing a truly massive championship to occur.

Currently, the number of qualification spots break down as follows

58 Regionals x 6 spots per regional = 348 qualification spots for regional qualifiers

FIRST in Michigan = 27 spots

MAR = 14 spots

20 Hall of Fame (National Chairman's Winners)

7 Original and Sustaining Teams (Extant from 1992-Present)

1 Engineering Inspiration Winner from 2012 (congratulations 1629!)

3 Championship Winners from 2012 (expanded to all 12 for 2013 due to Einstein issues)

If you add this up, you get a 420 team Championship (429 this year due to Einstein).

You can now see why there was no pre-registration this year, it would simply not be feasible to allow any more than those who are qualified to attend.

Three years ago, FIRST made a push to ensure that each team got 10 matches at Championship. The solution to this was to cut practice day in half and begin qualifications on Thursday. Last year, with 100 team divisions, the schedule was mostly unchanged, but teams played nine matches. Assuming teams still get 9 matches, increasing to 105 team divisions (420/4 = 105) gives you an additional 8 matches to play, or about 50 minutes of additional play time, something that would be hard to find in the schedule.

This leads me to believe that FIRST does NOT want the Championship to grow any larger. This does not take into account the other issues involved with a larger Championship, such as more pit space, more crates to ship with FedEx, more robots to inspect etc.

So, if you assume that there are some percentage of teams that will not attend the CMP despite being qualified (for example, the HoF teams that are no longer in existence, lack of funding/will/school support for qualified teams), and there are a limited number of teams that will qualify more than once and do NOT generate a wild card spot with the current system, you might be able to get back down to a sub-400 team championship.

As I write this post, the championship has 114 registered teams. I am going to assume that not too many teams that qualified this weekend have signed up at this time. We still have weeks 4-6 to play, as well as the MSC and MAR Championship (which nearly guarantee an additional 41 registrants).

Simply allowing the championship to fill to its mathematical capacity every year is not going to work out anymore, especially because FIRST continues to grow and more regionals/teams are added every year. Sooner or later, the CMP is going to have to grow by a significant amount to bring us back to the "old days," or we are going to have to accept that only those who are good enough to win (whether it be for on field or off field accomplishments) get to go to Championship. Does this mean that deserving teams will be left on the outside? Sadly, this will be the case.
__________________

Email | Twitter | Facebook | YouTube | Twitch
iTunes Podcast | Snapchat

A proud alumnus of teams 134 and 40 || Mentor of Team 190 || Director of Fun for BattleCry@WPI