[Daniel Brim]

Originally Posted by sst.thad

I would disagree completely with this. The teams that earn those awards are the teams that strive for excellence. If you look at the 4 teams that won RAS at championship this year (4488, 4451, 4472, 4731), None of them actually won a regional. 4451 went to 2 events, were alliance captains at both events from seeds 7 and 5, made it to the finals in one event, but did not with their way based on performance.

Just to clarify a bit on the behalf of 4451 (and to further your point), at Orlando they were the first pick by the #2 alliance (us). They did not lose based on their performance, they lost based on our performance. We picked them to score 54 points in each match and they did so in all nine elimination matches we played. If we hit our autonomous in finals 2 (or made the one shot we bounced off the bar), they would have qualified based on being a regional champion. Based on this, I don't think it's necessarily fair to lump them into the category of "rookie along for the ride at championships". I'm sure there are others that have similarly high performance.