[Ken Streeter]

Originally Posted by benhulett

The top 8 teams were given the choice of alliances, and only 2 bots outside of the top 24 were selected. I saw much better bots than some of those inside the top 24 that were impeded by team performance but were outstanding performers.

When I saw this post, my assumption, having not been at the Chesapeake regional, was that there must have been poor scouting by the top-seeded teams and they ended up relying mostly upon standings rather than performance-based scouting of the individual teams. However, just to be sure about this, I looked at the Chesapeake regional results to see how that came about.

What I actually found is that there was actually quite a bit of selection of teams outside of the top 24. Actually, there were seven alliance picks from outside of the top 24 seeded teams -- indeed, there was only one alliance where all three teams were seeded in the top 24! It seems to me that there was quite a lot of picking outside of the top 24 teams! Seven teams within the top 24 were "passed over" in the alliance picking process. (Indeed, of the #17 to #24 seeds, the only team which was selected for the elimination rounds was the #21 seed, team 11.)

Having not been there, this outside examination makes it look like the alliance captains must have used scouting information to guide their choices, other than simply looking at the official standings. (See below.)

Team     Seeding

#1 Alliance
836	1
1027	4
1748	39

#2 Alliance
614	2
339	14
359	50

#3 Alliance
1111	3
88	16
888	51

#4 Alliance
2377	5
1218	8
1629	12

#5 Alliance
768	6
293	13
134	28

#6 Alliance
224	7
75	15
1980	48

#7 Alliance
2234	9
341	11
449	41

#8 Alliance
1418	10
11	21
2016	43

Teams seeded in the top 24 that were "passed over"
484	17
869	18
1719	19
204	20
1933	22
53	23
2537	24

Originally Posted by Frenchie

Basic economics will tell you that if good teams regularly go unpicked, and poor-er teams get regularly picked, some day some team will boost up its scouting team, put together a killer alliance and win everything.

Actually, this looks like it may be what happened at Chesapeake, at least from the view of the "official rankings." The alliance which emerged as the champions was the #8 alliance, headed by the #10 seed (Team 1418), which selected the #21 seed (Team 11) and the #43 seed (Team 2016) to be their alliance partners. If you calculate the "seeding total" of their alliance, it was 10+21+43=74. This was the highest "seeding total" of any of the elimination-round alliances. Given the "official rankings" as the only information, one would think they would be the weakest alliance of all 8 alliances. Instead, they emerged as the winners! Clearly, they must have been doing some scouting to put together the champion alliance out of the teams that were passed over at least once by each of the other 7 alliance captains!

However, this analysis does confirm your point that the "official rankings" don't do a good job of identifying the best robots. However, it appears that the alliance captains didn't rely solely upon the "official rankings" to make their picks, but instead tried to find the good teams regardless of their "official rankings." Why your team wasn't picked, I don't know as I wasn't there, but it doesn't look like your being passed over was simply because you finished out of the top 24 teams.