[Hot_Copper_Frog]

Originally Posted by tindleroot

Obviously, Chairman's is given to "model teams" for outreach, program growth and sustainability, etc, but I wonder if FIRST used to consider the strength of a team's robot performance as well. It's a little bit surprising that many, many hall of fame teams are also perrenial contenders for Einstein, considering the outreach portion of Chairman's seems to be the most important (not trying to knock powerhouse teams here, but if Chairman's and robots are truly independent then you would expect the hall of fame to contain a large range of robot-skilled teams).

Well, I'd imagine that part of being a model team is fielding a consistently competitive robot. Not because winning is important, but consistently high performing robots are a product of teams that have strong partnerships with their sponsors/mentors, a solid base of institutional FIRST design knowledge, effective implementation of the engineering design process, etc. I don't necessarily think that robot performance is explicitly factored into the decision, but the teams that are "doing it right" will probably end up with pretty good robots because of they way they are structured.