[dtengineering]

I'll briefly state my support for the non-pooled match scheduling system employed in previous years. Sometimes we ended up going against a powerhouse alliance, sometimes we were part of one, but I at least had confidence that overall the alliances would end up balanced. After all, we were being treated the same as everyone else. Now we aren't -- we're being treated the same as teams with the same team number, which is quite a different thing.

In fact, had we (Team 1346) attended the Wisconsin Regional, we would have been grouped in with the "veteran" pool. If we had attended Great Lakes we would have been in the "rookie" pool. At most regionals we would have been pool "B", smack in the middle.

Looking at the overall results of the five second weekend regionals (I've left off Brazil, not because I don't like Brazil, but because it is listed as a "Pilot" regional) and sorting the teams into pools based on team numbers and looking at the top eight qualifiers, then comparing the numbers to similar regionals from last year you get:

Top Eight Qualifying Spots Sorted by "Pool" for Second Week Regionals
Pool.............................................. .......2007............2006
Veterans (lowest 1/3 of team numbers).......14................21
Mid Year Teams......................................16..... ...........10
Rookies (highest 1/3 of team numbers).........10.................9

This would indicate to me that (as one would suspect) the pooling scheme has resulted in a more even distribution of top eight finishes amongst the three pools. Is this good? Is this bad? Are the numbers even significant?

All I know, is that if they are signficant, then veteran teams are being denied positions as alliance captains because of their team numbers. If the numbers aren't significant then the pooling system wasn't needed in the first place, was it?

Jason

P.S. Apologies for not formatting the excel file a little neater, it was mostly for my work and the data is summarized here.