[scottandme]

I don't think 2 "division" are necessary, but it's a valid solution for many high school sports. Expand the district point model, or adopt a system similar to FTC or FLL where only some awards earn a Champs berth. Again, we're only talking about 75-100 current qualifiers that would need to be re-routed. FTC only sends 128 teams to Champs as is...

Again, this is an argument to make FRC a more legitimate competitive enterprise, which is not what FIRST seems to want, but dreaming along for a second here...

Originally Posted by EricH

How in tarnation do you deal with a team that just got relegated last year and now has 3 regional wins, one EI, and one RCA, or somesuch impressive resume? Do you put them in the relegated CMP or in the top CMP? Eh? How about the team that won the whole thing last year, and is nowhere to be found this year? Eh? Fair warning, I'm going to keep asking this until I get an answer. It shouldn't be all that hard to figure out--it'd happen often enough, no? And it's happened often enough with one CMP already, somewhat.

Well, that happens in many high school sports. Some schools are perpetually competitive, and stay in the top division, with the bottom of the division(s) experiencing more "churn" as teams rise and fall.

Originally Posted by EricH

To put it mildly: Relegation works fairly well when there is NOT a lot of "churn" of teams joining/exiting a league--you can assign a team once, they go up and down, and maybe eventually they fold and leave completely. Relegation fails miserably when there IS a lot of "churn"--and in FRC, there's a lot of "churn" going to the Champs. The top teams will tend to stay the same and make a lot of trips to the top event (read: Poofs, Simbotics, HOT, etc.). The not-so-top teams won't--and that's where you have to make a lot of tough calls. Probably a third--a full third--of the teams at CMP this year won't be there next year. So now you have a new X teams to assign, and then relegate, that may or may not end up to be relegated in the long run because they just plain don't make it the next year.

Who do you think makes up the "churn" at Champs in the current qualification system? Pretty much all the teams that the OP proposed moving to the "B" champs.

As per Jim Zondag's awesome Championship History Data - only 567 teams made the elimination rounds from 2001 to 2015. Only 494 of those teams are still active. Only 270 unique teams made elims from 2012-2015. That's a lot of repetition.

Originally Posted by EricH

One final thought: If some sort of promotion/relegation does happen, any and all talk about "reducing travel costs" needs to be expunged from the record, completely. If it is in fact cheaper for a team to travel to one event, but they are assigned to the other due to the promotion/relegation system, travel costs are not reduced. Can you imagine if a Detroit CMP-bound team ended up in Houston? Or if Mr. Forbes (just to pick on him) and his team ended up going to Detroit when Houston was closer? And if that wasn't just the exception, but the rule?

Well, all the "reducing costs" talking points are already pretty weak. The team distribution doesn't support the current venue choices. There are too many teams in the Northeast, and not nearly enough near Texas. Circles are 150, 300, and 600 mile. Blue goes to Houston, Red goes to Detroit. There are already going to be a lot of teams closer to Detroit being assigned to Houston.