9th seed decline

[Garrett.d.w]

Originally Posted by inkling16

Can anyone provide insight as to the selections at these events? Were there a lot of top 8 declines? Was there a high seeded team that no one wanted to be with?

I can shed a little light on Oregon.
Oregon is a huge event with many robots of varied build and design quality. This, mixed with the process through which the seeding rounds are formed created many 3 on 1 matches throughout the day, often with desirable robots loosing matches even though they played beautifully. Anyway, seeding was very unkind to generally good teams (Mean Machine, Bear Metal, Flaming Chickens, SOTA Bots, all played several 3 on 1) and very kind to average teams (such as my own, where we were carried by our alliance partners). This all created a situation where people in the top 8 took risks on robots that didn't seed too well because there were no sure picks in their own ranks. Just to give you an idea at how wonky things were, the winning alliance seeds were 1, 19, and 25. The bots on our alliance were seeded 8, 12, and 34.