FRC Top 25 week 3 results

[The Lucas]

Originally Posted by JamesBrown

There is no way that number can go up if more "experts" post. I wouldn't expect every ones lists to match, but the diferences should be in the lower ranked teams. If you look at college sports polls then there is usually consensus between the experts, it is pretty rare to see a team raked #3 by one person and not ranked by any one else.

I don't know who the "experts" are but I have to say I agree with Tom, I would not take the rankings too seriously.

Have you ever really looked at analysis of all the voters in a major poll? It is full of "extreme voters". For comparison lets look at Week 3 of the AP CFB poll on pollspeak.com (I will admit that I am enough of a college football geek that I do occasionally look at polls, Jeff Sagarin computer rankings and listen to a recruiting podcast)

Let's look at this one team: Auburn. Some voters had them as high as 10 while others had them unranked. How did that turn out for them? BCS Champions. Lets look at one that went the other way: Michigan. Highest 8th Lowest: unranked. Interestingly enough, James Madison University received a few votes as high as 19 after their big upset of VA Tech (then went on to miss the playoffs of the FCS).

So maybe the one extreme voter you mention is the "Scott Wolf" of the group. However, it brings up other issues in the trying to put together a list of Top 25 robots, who has actually seen the #3 robot in question. I was at Chesapeake so I didn't see any of the SAC webcast or any archive vids. All I know is their OPR was 21.064 and lost in the QF, probably not a #3 by those metrics, but I still have no clue what their robot actually does (maybe it ran a successful double Uber and they had hard luck in the #8 Alliance). I would like to see that expert comment on their unique pick and maybe we would learn something. Mike and Justin, is there going to be expert comments added to the website any time soon.

According to the overall OPR list, there have been 1337 non unique robots at 3 weeks worth of events (no I didn't make that # up to be leet). Noone could possibly have processed all of those performances at regionals when trying to make a list of 25, the process is inherently difficult and inaccurate. You can reduce your sample size somewhat by only considering elim alliances, but then you run into a new problem: How do you split the credit among alliance members for the win? At Alamo, 16 went undefeated, 148 put up the double uber, both put up their share of tubes and minibots to dominate the elims, who gets the bigger share of the win pie. The 3 team alliance nature of all recent FIRST games makes it more difficult to evaluate individual robot performance. More archived vids wold help everyone vote better, and it is not as simple as setting your DVR to recored a Sat of College Football or watching highlights on College Football Final. I'm sure Mike an Justin would love to play highlights, but that would take a larger community effort and a longer show.

I'm frankly glad this poll does't reach the "consensus" of the major college polls. As I pointed out before they don't totally reach a consensus, but similarities in their votes are largely due to pressure to conform with other voter's past votes. This starts with the baseless "Preseason Poll", which is all hype loosely related to last year's performance (which is at least the same game unlike FIRST). That Preseason poll gets cemented in future polls as pollsters are reluctant to move anyone down until they lose despite all other evidence to the contrary. FRC Top25 has the rule that you can't vote for someone that hasn't competed to prevent this sort of mentality.

The poll will never be perfect and at this stage it is still new and getting the kinks out. However the poll and the show is fun and that is the point. I need to encourage the scouts on my team that watch webcasts to vote (along with me) in the public poll and join in the fun & community.