Quote:
Originally Posted by Andrew Schreiber
Champs and "Poverty Champs"?
Sorry for going all ricky-bobby, but there's two champs (fact, it's happening, boo hiss whine complain). The only way to have a single "all the best teams" championship is one of them be the REAL championship. The other be "the other champs where we huck all the teams that don't really belong at a real championship".
This is not possible for a variety of reasons, the least of which is probably that I just said the phrase poverty champs.
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I would love to hear why a two-tier Championship model wouldn't work.
I disagree with the label "Poverty Champs." I'd rather call it "stepping stone," or "redemption" Champs.
Let's face it, the current system is not great at recognizing the truly "great" teams. Every year, there are teams with great robots that don't qualify for Champs, because of a variety of factors (bad luck, bad partners, they're the third-best-team at a deep event, ect). Are you saying that these teams, that would normally have no post-season play at a Championship event of any caliber, would feel slighted or cheated by attending a second-tier championship, and being given the chance to prove their ability?
There are also plenty of teams who attend Champs for "the experience" but otherwise gain nothing, because they are blown out of the water every single match. This is demotivating and disheartening on a regional level, and I'm sure it's similar on the World Stage. Having a second-tier championship event would give these teams an arena they could be competitive in. And if the people in this thread who say that the District Championships are inspiring are to be believed, why can't these second-tier Championships be just as inspiring as the World Championships?
What I propose are Super-Regionals, but not as a stepping-stone to the World Championships, but as an end goal. In my ideal world, all of FIRST would be converted to a district-points system, where FIRST takes each team's top event scores and uses that to determine who goes where. The top 400 teams go to the World Championships as they are now: four divisions, winners face off on Einstein. The 401st - top40% teams attend a Super-Regional.
I invite FIRST to set up
more Championship events for the 2017 season. Super Regionals of 200 local teams. Not only is it much easier to find facilities for 200-team events, but they're also big enough to warrant the inclusion of sponsorship displays, scholarship rows, and seminar series.
Furthermore, this idea is
scalable. Whenever one Super Regional fills up, simply add another to keep with FIRST's 25% (minimum) stat. This allows FIRST to keep their "quota" of FRC teams, while still running an exclusive, competition-oriented Championship.
And because this system adds another destination, and not another stepping stone,
the FRC season does not go any longer than it is today. There will be some last-minute hotel bookings as teams find out where they compete, but that's the case right now as well (and it's the same case as any model FIRST can come up with).
In the short term, FIRST can take Houston (which I believe is scheduled for the week before St Louis / Detroit) and make it a Super-Duper Regional of 400 teams that services the area of two Regular Super-Regionals, and then "downgrade" to a regular Super-Regional in 2021.
(If all this sounds familiar, it's because I've
already written about it here.)