[Alex2614]

Originally Posted by IKE

One piece of Historical information that I think would be enlightening if someone could put it together is the number of unique teams that have competed at the championship vs. the number of championship slots.

I think the inverse of this, IE the number of unique teams taht have never competed at the championship might be eye-opening as well.

I know the number of teams that have played in elims/playoffs vs. the number of slots is very eye-opening. Jim Z. did a study on that a few years ago, and it was pretty surprising. My guess is Championship slots would be similar. IE, I suspect that about 200/320-400 slots are routinely the same teams over and over... thus the realy mix of championship experience is a much smaller percentage. The 200 new spots this year and next year will support that quite a bit, also, the 200 new spots in 2017 and beyond will dramatically increase the "newbies" or "unique" championship experiences.

I personally do not think that every team needs to compete at the championship. Mathematically, FIRST seems to discuss the 25% attendance as if that will make it so that every team can participate within a 4 year window. Fact of the matter is, the math just doesn't work that way.

That's something I've been thinking about. As your percentage of teams at champs goes down, the number of unique slots will probably go down too, as more powerhouses are born. I don't want it to be the same 400 teams every single year with little margin for new teams. And as the number of events increases, we're going to run into a problem. It's like Einstein. How many "new" teams were on Einstein every year until last year? Not very many. It was a lot of the same teams over and over again. And when they doubled the number of teams on Einstein, alas, we saw many teams who it was their first time to Einstein, and thus, now get to go back to their communities and sponsors and tell them about it. The sponsors don't care that there are twice as many teams on Einstein as there were last year. They care that THEIR team was there. Likewise with two championships.