[Brandon Holley]

Originally Posted by John.Antilla

I see your point. I thought the speculation that teams will develop the behavior of not competing until late in the season to take advantage of the extra time WAS the counterpoint. Maybe I wasn't clear enough. Thanks for the feedback.

This is where an experiment (or targeted data collection) can be pretty helpful I think. Is it simply time with the robot that is making teams better later in the season? Or is the act of executing on a field, with tighter constraints and against real competition forcing iteration/evolution that bumps performance later in the season?

FWIW, my personal starting guess is that its probably 80% the latter, and 20% the former.

With my above viewpoint noted, I don't view competing later as an automatic advantage. You may be potentially gaining more time with your robot, but at the same time, so is everyone else. Per Jim's data, you would need to come out of the gate with a stronger performance if your first event was week 5 versus week 1. This also totally passes the eye test I see each season. You get more time with your robot, but that time comes at the expense of HAVING to be better to reach the same end performance.

-Brando