[Boltman]

Originally Posted by Citrus Dad

I agree; I've posted about this earlier. A bit of history: we got the No 1 seed in Curie in 2013 in part because we had a very favorable schedule--play with powerhouses, never against them. In 2015, it was the opposite, but we scrambled through and made ourselves very attractive to 118. Our scheduling bonus was in the initial assignment to Newton when we had already played with 118 in Sac (and we knew 1671 extremely well.)

The solution is in fact quite easy. It's a two-step scheduling algorithm that accounts for last season's performance. I believe that all of the professional sports leagues already do this. First, you sort the teams in bins A, B & C based on a ranking criterion--probably a system akin to the district point system. (Rookies = 0). Each match is scheduled by drawing a team from each bin for each alliance as an added step. All of the other constraints then come into place.

The single biggest problem? FIRST has to explicitly acknowledge that teams are of differing competitive quality. The rationale for the ChampSplit seems to imply that they are unwilling to make this acknowledgement as somehow being demeaning. I believe that it is much more disheartening to face two WC teams in a qualifying round and know that there's little that you can do to slow them down when they are paired because all of your alliancemates are young teams.



And I've been quite disappointed in the announcing prep done for FRC teams. Too often they bring in a "voice" who has little connection to FRC. At Sacramento, I plan to give the announcers much more prep (I'm on the RPC). They can spread out the kudos for teams like 254 over the whole competition so there's not a huge buildup in a single match (but it's also important to generate buzz by acknowledging team accomplishments--watch any elite sporting competition.) And it's also very important to acknowledge what other newer or lower ranked teams have done. Even noting that 5137 had been fighting for No. 1 seed all competition should have been notes.

Again, congrats. Please come to Sac soon!

Thanks for the world class insights.... SAC how much further is that? LOL, I literally almost fell asleep on the way home...had to pull over to take a 20 minute "not crash car" nap