Last week I took a look at the results of the first weekend regionals (
this thread), and concluded that veteran teams had no advantage when it came to winning qualifying matches.
Discussion followed, including some interesting statisics from last year that showed veterans did tend to score more points than rookies, and also surrounding the many benefits that come with experience other than just the ability to win matches. There was also the oft-repeated note that winning qualifying matches is not necessarily related to being selected for the finals or for doing well in the finals.
The match scheduling system was also discussed, as it pretty much ensured last week that for every match a veteran team won, a veteran team also lost a match.
So, presuming that the match scheduling system bias would be fixed this week, I promised to take look at this week's data.
A correlation of team number to ranking actually results in a value of -.026, which -- if it were large enough to be significant, which I'm not arguing it is -- would actually suggest newer teams ranked higher than veterans.
This is supported by the fact that the 61 teams numbered less than 300 had an average seed of 22.3 while the 76 teams numbered greater than 2000 had an average seed of 21.4.
This flies in the face of the common assumption that low-numbered veteran teams are more likely to win matches. It sure doesn't seem to be happening this year.
Jason