I like this idea for one reason. It gives us one more things to discuss. People know that polls aren't fair (that's why we got the BCS). However, they are interesting. If done every week, we would get the chance to see how people's thoughts about robots change over the season. Last year, my team (73) competed at Cleveland, the first week of regionals. We were the best stacker to compete that week, and a lot of people talked about us. Then the next week Moe competed, and a lot of people talked about Moe and compared Moe to us. Then week 3 and after, nobody talked about us. Was that because everyone forgot about us, or because we weren't nearly as good as the robots revealed in week 3 and after? When you are redoing the rankings each week, you are forced to think about robots that competed before, and whether the new robots are better or worse.
As far as it being a popularity contest, it would be. But so are these forums. However, by makingpeople to quantify whos better then who, it will cause people to think about why. Are they better because they won nationals last year, or because they won the GLR regional but no one's heard of them? I know if I see a team in the poll that i'm not familier with, I'm definetly going to try to find out more information about them. As long as you get enough people from each region voting, most regional bias will be evened out. The only bias remaining is the chiefdelphi bias (teams with a presence on chiefdelphi more popular than teams that don't). However, we have that bias anyways, and like I said before, by forcing people to quantify a reason, some fo that bias may disappear.
Here are a few suggestions I have based on the original post, though.
First of all, top 3 teams is way to small for a contest with 800 teams. I'd go for top 15. College football has the top 25 for 117 teams and college basketball has the top 25 for 260 something teams. The fact that you are thinking about categories is good, but we definetly need more then 3.
I'd also not limit it to vetran teams. Rookie teams have much different perspectives and their votes should be factored in as well.
As far as categories, I'd go for something along the lines of the following: Best Small Ball, Best Big Ball, Best Hanging, Best Overall, Best Rookie, and Team You Would Be Most Likely to Pick.
PS. There was only 1 real college football champion. USC!
