[Paul Copioli]

I thought Curie had the most "normal" alliance selection of any of the divisions. Let me share some things I observed.

First, our team agrees that 7 matches is really not eough to statistically determine who the top 8 really is. Unfortunately, teams that are clearly not top 8 caliber will get into the top 8. This is one of the reasons the FIRST in Michigan district model had 12 matches at each of the district events.

In our team's opinion, there were 4 teams in the top 8 that were not really top 8 caliber. Such is life at the Championship.

Our team scouts every match and takes the best statistical data we can for each and every team. Scouting the actual matches is the best way to definitely determine if a team will make a good partner in the elimination rounds. On Friday, we have a 3 to 4 hour strategy meeting where we make a pick list of the top 24 teams based on our scouting data and feedback from the drive team. We use feedback from the drive team to help determine if a team is hard or easy to work with. Our scouting team then focuses on the teams that are very close in performance on Friday to see how they are doing on Saturday morning matches. We really focus on teams that are performing better as the weekend moves along.

OPR and other indicators are really only needed when you can't actually watch the matches in person. We do not use OPR because OPR will not get you to Einstein. Period.

Here are some other things we do not use:

- Record in the division
- Ranking in the division
- Performance at Regional events
- Team number
- Where a team is from

I can't even tell you what 68 or 247 records or rankings were because we didn't care.

For the last 5 years, I have witnessed the strangest picks by teams in the top 8. Teams that would have been our 4th or 5th pick slipped all the way to the bottom of the draft. This year in Curie was the first time that I can remember that the teams selecting partners during the draft basically picked how we would have picked (except 68 as they should not have been around for us). With 87 teams in the division some good teams will be overlooked and there is no way aroud it.

I want to make one more point. The serpentine draft has caused a lot more teams to decline. I can tell you that our team prefers not to decline, but will if we feel that it gives us a strategic advantage. We declined 1806 (the #2 seed) not becasue we didn't think they were a good team (they were very high on our list), but simply because of the serpentine. If the serpentine did not exist, then we would have definitely accepted their invitation. Team 1806 knew prior to alliance selections that we were going to decline as I told their team that we would decline. They used a very good strategy picking us anyway so no one else could select us. They basically forced 217 and 399 to form their own alliances (they asked 399 to be their partner too and 399 declined).

Our division had only 14 teams with a positive "plus/minus". Plus/minus (for our team) is the number of points scored by the robot minus the number of points in the robot's trailer. This year it is the biggest indicator of a team's contribution. Obviously, for pure defensive bots we only look at points scored in their trailer as +/- will, by definition, always be negative. As the #7 seed, we knew we could get two very good robots to complement our playing style. We felt we could build a better alliance from #7 than from #2. And for those of you wondering, I didn't realize we had an all Michigan alliance until about 10 minutes after selection. It is just the way things worked out.

Someone made a comment about high number teams not getting picked. We had a few high number teams on our list (I was suprised no one picked 3115), but we had the #7 and #10 picks in the draft.