2013 NE FIRST District Rankings

[MikeE]

Originally Posted by Bill_B

Just so I can tell if I'm understanding this. The points were calculated as if the regionals in N.E. were district events. They would then determine invitation to the proposed district championship, viz. the top 80, right? NE District championship to be played "this" weekend from which 30 or so teams being invited to CMP in St. Louis. Have I got it right?

Now can we discuss why this points summary may, or may not, be slightly misleading? First, there is the number of events attended by many of the teams. That is, not enough opportunity for the one-event teams to get points for their Q-wins in this summary. A supposed advantage to the district model is that teams will get more matches played as a result. Perhaps the points for single regional event teams could be amplified a bit to reflect this. E.g., the scores from 9 Q-matches at CT regional might get a multiplier of 14/9ths to predict performance in two district events with 7 Q-matches each.

Second, the relative size of regionals to district events would change the dynamics of those competitions somewhat. Not sure about what the effect on points would be, but I'm sure it would be there.

Then there's the even more nebulous effect of the possibility of 8 hours "out of bag" preceding 2-day district events. Is this a factor? At present, teams attending 2-day events get to schedule a sort of "virtual Thursday" by logging time with their robot out of its bag before the competition. Will we allow this in the NE District?

Right - the results are informative but not a good predictive model of the district.

The rankings above from this year's Regionals primarily reflect whether a team attended 1 or 2+ Regionals, but under the district model every team would be guaranteed 2 events.

The other impacts come from having smaller events, which increase the expected points awarded in several ways:

• increasing the number of qualification matches per team,
• increasing the probability of being selected for eliminations (e.g. 24/34 rather than 24/65 for a big regional),
• increasing the probability of winning an award, and
• arguably diluting the strength of elimination alliances, hence increasing the variance of expected elimination points

Assuming district events average 34 teams each (155 teams attending 2 of 9 events), and a relatively gentle schedule of 12 qualification matches, then the expected point total under the proposed model would be 39.9 for competition performance only. Award points would be additional.

The average from the table above is only 23.2 including awards.