[Brian Maher]

Originally Posted by M217

Just wanted to say I find it a little strange that the OP placed DCMP Winner Second Pick/Backup in Category II while he put Regional Winner Second Pick/Backup in Category V. I understand that obviously District Champs will have significantly deeper fields than Regionals, but is it really this big of a difference? Seems kinda extreme...

There are three reasons behind this decision:

1) The fact that number of district points earned by these robots almost always puts them above the cutoff to qualify as a District Points team

2) Average OPR from this year's Championship shows that the DCMP Winner 2nd Pick / Backups are considerably stronger than those of regionals:

• DCMP Winner Pick 2 / Backup: 36.6
• Regional Winner Pick 2 / Backup: 28.3

Note: 2nd picks and backups were lumped together because I felt the sample sizes (1 for DCMP winners and 1 for Regional winners) for backups were too small to evaluate individually.

3) Having attended or watched footage from a number of regionals and District Championships, anecdotally, I have seen considerably higher performance from the winning second picks at DCMPs than at regionals. This makes sense when the reasoning for why this may be is considered.
The barrier for entry to a DCMP is way higher than that of a regional: strong performance at District events (or District Chairman's) versus nothing at all.
In addition, the winning alliance at a regional represents the 30-65 teams attending that regional. The winning alliance at a District Championship represents the 50-400 teams in that district.

Originally Posted by AGPapa

because FIRST doesn't give DCMP winners automatic qualification.

While this is generally a non-issue due to the impact of the 90 playoff round performance points most DCMP winners receive, that is technically false.

Originally Posted by Section 7.4.4, FRC Admin Manual 2016

These slots will be made up of qualifying award winners from the District Championship (Chairman’s Award, Engineering Award, and Rookie All Star winners), all teams on the Winning Alliance from the District Championship (including any Back-Up teams participating), any qualifying award winners among district teams who traveled to Regionals, plus the teams on the final District ranking list, as deep in the ranking list as the District needs to go to fill their allocation.