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Unread 12-03-2014, 03:40
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Re: FRC Blogged-Standard District Point Structure

Sean is 100% correct about the approach. Most people immediately think that ranking system is supposed to determine who the best overall team is. In reality that is irrelevant. The best teams will always float to the top of the ranking system and being ranked #1 vs. #6 means nothing except for bragging rights - they're both advancing. The actual purpose of the point system is to determine the cut off of who advances and who doesn't advance.

In a league of any size the best teams always standout. Think about college football or basketball rankings. How many times do you see people arguing that the #25 team should really be the #1 team? You don't. Usually the conversation is about how the #5 team was "robbed" by not being #1. The problem is that once you get down in the middle of the pack things are harder to sort. This point system is a solution that objectively sorts out those teams in the middle. One of the things we carefully considered was how to not over-reward the top end since that could have negative effects on the middle tier. We felt it was more important to reward consistent play over winning just one event and missing elims at another.

Just to clarify one thing - you get 5 points per elimination win IF you win the round. Rewarding teams for taking an elimination matchup to a third match or penalizing teams for not sweeping is a dangerous proposition. In this situation you now have a system with a variable number of total points. This shifts the cut off around a lot, which makes it harder for teams to predict the likelihood they'll advance. If teams near the cut off have to wait until after week 6 to know for sure that they're advancing that leaves them a few days to secure transportation and hotel rooms for their district championship.
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