[shewejff]

I share the same concerns as moogboy about teams playing in their third event, particularly the massive number at Bedford. From seeing what happens at these later events in years past, our team didn't even consider going to Troy, Livonia, and especially Bedford. The "home" event that is selected for us has been a later event the last few years, and we don't even consider going to it.

Yes, filling in those empty slots "increase[s] FRC team participation". The problem is that the teams that are going to a third event are typically better than your average Michigan FRC team. They're frequently the more well established teams that also have better than average robots. To back up this point, I looked at the 26 third event teams competing at Bedford. On average, they scored 30 points towards going to MSC at the events that they have already played. Michigan teams earn an average of about 24 points towards MSC at each of their events. Those third event teams are higher caliber teams that now have two events of practice and tweaking their robots under their belts. They're going up against "average" FRC teams with only one event of practice. I'd be curious to see the average number of points that the 14 second event teams get at Bedford. I'd bet that they are going to get much lower than average of 24 points.

I don't really know a good solution to the problem. I understand that having an event with 14 teams isn't acceptable. If there was a better way to distribute the open spots across all the events, that would be optimal (e.g., all events capped at 36 teams). The only problem is that you don't really know exactly how many Michigan teams there will be next year so an exact cap amount isn't known immediately, but a reasonable approximation wouldn't be that hard. It would mean that teams can't go to third events (they can still go out of state), but it would make it more fair for the teams at the later events.

At the very least, teams shouldn't be eligible for awards at their third event. Every award the third event teams win also sucks away points from the second event teams. Judging by the awards that the third event teams have already won at their first two events, it wouldn't surprise me if only a small handful of awards (if any) are won by the second event teams at Bedford.