Championships Competition Structure

[emekablue]

I'm not sure if this has been discussed before, but I have a couple questions/ comments about the CMP competition structure.

Coming back from the CMP for FRC, the first question everyone asks is, "How did you do?". I usually reply that our robot did pretty well: we were seeded in the 30's, picked by the 3rd alliance captain in our division, but lost during the quarterfinals. But most people get confused due to the different divisions thing and then they misjudge the quality of our performance because we made it to 'only' the quarterfinals. I could also tell them our OPR and that ranking, but I'd also have to explain what OPR was and how it was calculated.

Question 1: Is there an easier way to explain how our team/robot 'did'?

Furthermore, during quals, your individual team has a ranking. During eliminations, your alliance doesn't really. It almost seems like your ranking from quals doesn't really matter that much. In Galileo, all the top four teams lost during the quarterfinal matches (very close matches, though).

Q2: Would it be beneficial to complete the alliance ranking by doing a 3rd-8th competition?
Q3: Why does the 8th alliance go against the 1st? Shouldn't be more logical for the 1st to go against 2nd, 3rd and 4th? and so on? Or are they trying to knock off the lower performing alliances for a more exciting finals?

I also noticed that during championships, between divisions, there really isn't much robot vs robot interaction. I.e. One could win Einstein (from Galileo) and be considered the world champions, but they were never put against teams from Newton or Archimedes or Curie, just their respective finalists. Even though there are just too many teams for it to just be a free for all competition, I'd probably be one to say I'd want to see two super-alliances go against each other! (That's probably what off-season competitions are for, though.)

In summary, I think that the competition structure is a bit too complicated to explain to a lay person. I get it because I have to and I've been around it so long that it's pretty natural. But it becomes kind of a task when explaining it to my friends, families, teachers and administrators, etc.