FRC Blogged-Standard District Point Structure

[Tristan Lall]

This looks reasonable to me.


I'd agree the team age point bonus could stand to be clarified. The statement "Points earned at District Championships will be multiplied by three and then added to points earned at District events, to determine the final season points total for the Team." implies either that points earned independently of the events (i.e. team age points) don't count, or that team age points are earned at events (and thus count repeatedly). The first would be silly, and the second perhaps a bit excessive. Fortunately, FIRST has plenty of time to amend the formula to state that it's a one-time bonus, applied at the beginning of the season.

But even if the team age bonus is per-event, it's only a little excessive. The team age bonus is basically a subsidy that benefits the teams that have the highest rate of failure-induced dissolution (and consequently set bad examples for everyone who sees the teams disband and develops a poor impression of the FRC program), and distributes the harm evenly and lightly across the rest of the field. It seems like an equitable compromise to me, given that the alternative (letting the teams fail) could easily be more harmful overall.

Sure, there will be a few teams on the margin who, if there hadn't been a team age bonus, would have qualified, and who will instead sit out. But that's fine, because there needs to be a systematic way of recognizing that there is value in having a few teams participate in the higher-level events, even if they're not really the best on the field. Just as the points for awards are a recognition of FIRST's view that the game and the team's off-field activities are not wholly separable, there's a fair argument to be made that the team age is intrinsically a characteristic that should be considered in selecting who advances. Granted, all of this dilutes the purity of the competition, but it's not as if that dilution hasn't been the status quo for many years (with awards factoring into qualification for the Championship). If that dilution were of greater magnitude, I'd be pretty annoyed too—but I don't think it's that bad on balance.


As for the fact that winning a regional outside your district claws back a Championship slot from the rest of the teams in the district, it's not perfect, but it properly addresses the larger issue of a district team qualifying at a regional (i.e. outside of its district) and thus diminishing the opportunities for the regional teams who don't have the additional opportunity to qualify through the district process. In other words, it avoids hurting the teams outside any district, and—provided that you're as competitive at the regional as you are in your district, which is admittedly far from guaranteed—your slot at the regional is kind of like a replacement for the slot you'd have been likely to win at your district championship. Were that to be the case, the clawback would be reasonable, because you've already qualified and therefore don't need the district championship slot. (And it doesn't harm anyone else either, because they couldn't have won the slot that you were going to otherwise win.)