[Mr. Freeman]

I don't think informing the top teams of your robot's ability is a bad thing. It might sound "desperate", but if you do it right it might actually be really helpful.
At the Colorado regional there was some team (sorry, forgot the number) that made a really helpful scouting booklet of all the teams at the regional.
During the alliance selections, alliances 1-8 picked pretty quickly, they knew who they wanted to choose. But alliance 8 took a really long time to make their second choice, and I saw almost every single other alliance on the field flipping through that scouting manual like crazy while teams 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, made their decision.
I think some of the selection decisions were rushed simply because the alliances weren't aware of which teams were both A) not already picked, and B) preformed well but were ranked low enough that no one really noticed them (from what I've heard, this seems to be fairly common).
Talking to the high ranked teams could, if nothing else, give them a team to pick if their first few choices are taken by other the alliances.