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Unread 19-04-2015, 00:44
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FRC #0846 (Funky Monkeys)
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Re: What percentage of FRC teams should attend championships?

Quote:
Originally Posted by Citrus Dad View Post
All other sports that have faced a growing league size have expanded their playoffs. Think of baseball which use to just have the AL and NL pennant winners play. That's clearly no longer the case. The question now is how should the Champs be structured.
Comparing to professional sports in this context isn't a good idea because expanded playoffs are almost entirely due to the league wanting extra revenue. In pretty much all pro sports, all playoff games are sold out, meaning that any other playoff games that are added will almost certainly be sold out as well.

Now an aside:

In general one thing I personally would love (not that this would ever happen), is that we get rid of the elimination tournament at regionals. I would prefer an EPL style ranking system, where the champion is determined at the end of the season by whoever is on top in the standings. Teams play every other team twice during the EPL season, so obviously that level of interplay is unlikely to be achieved during a regional, but if we continued playing 'quals' during the standard elims time, we'd get quite a few more matches in. As it is, FRC rankings within a regional generally turn out all right (I admit that strength of schedule is definitely a factor that helps/hurts some teams at every event), but I'd be interested to see just how many more matches are necessary at an event to make the rankings as true as possible.

The reason I would prefer this kind of system is because I think it could lead to increased competitiveness at champs. Too often it happens that the 3rd-5th best robots at a regional do not advance to STL because of the current playoffs structure. (I will also admit that such a proposal is inherently unfair to those teams who dedicate their game strategy to one specific game phase - this year those would be dedicated canburglars; teams who focused only on building the fastest burglar likely wouldn't seed high even if they were given 16 qual matches).

Of course as long as there are several automatic champs bids for non-matchplay purposes, the impact of this kind of plan is very watered down... But my ultimate hope is that if we figure out a system that qualifies a higher percentage of "competitive" teams, then we will have fewer arguments about how many robots to quality. The issue is that even if you increase champs capacity to 600-800 teams, you're still going to have deserving robots miss out due to the way we qualify teams from regionals. If we can draw a brightline in the regional/district rankings structure, then it becomes easier to stomach if a team misses out on champs - you can point to the table and objectively show that their robot wasn't quite as competitive as the top X# of teams.

As we've seen Frank talk about, he wants every high schooler to have the opportunity to attend Champs in their high school career, primarily from an inspiration standpoint. My viewpoint is that if a student has persevered and stuck with their team for all four years, then they have already been inspired. If we're talking about a student who would be willing to travel to champs with their team, then it's pretty safe to assume that this student is willing to make meaningful contributions to the team (whether it's mech, software, grant writing, etc), and they truly do understand the ideals of FIRST. Speaking personally, my team was lucky enough to qualify for champs my senior year, and I did attend, but I was already inspired by the program long before. The inspiration came from getting eliminated by 254 year after year at the regional level. And of course beyond 254, SVR always has plenty of powerhouses, but my point is that Frank's argument for giving students the opportunity to attend champs at least once implies that these are the type of students who understand the gravity of FIRST already, and they can feel the same type of inspiration at the regional level. And even if a student never attends a competition at all, but they stick with their team for four years, I'm positive that they will feel the positive impact of the program by investing so many hours into building the robot and supporting their team in whatever way they are capable.
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