How do the 2014 Regionals and Districts stack up?

[Nemo]

Originally Posted by Nathan Streeter

Do you think you could post .pdfs of these same charts, but with Districts and Regionals on separate charts?

Sure, here are a couple with regionals and districts separated.
Districts depth vs top tier.pdf
Regionals depth vs top tier.pdf

After thinking about this a bit more, I modified my methods again. In baseball we have Wins Above Replacement (WAR), and in FRC we have Minimum Competitive Concept (MCC). They are similar concepts. I subtracted a baseline amount from each team's score in an attempt to represent the value a team adds above a bare level.

Defining "replacement level" is somewhat arbitrary, but I defined it as attending one event, having a 5-7 record, getting picked late or not being selected, going down in the quarterfinals or not playing in elims, having an OPR of 10 (about 10% of the season's max OPR), and not winning awards. That amounts to about 15 points on the scale. Teams with negative performance index defaulted to 0. About 40% of teams competing in 2013 had an index of 15 or less before this adjustment. The idea of this adjustment is to try to quantify the "value" that teams bring above and beyond the most basic level of competitive achievement. I think that produced slightly better numbers for gauging how exciting and competitive elimination rounds will be at a particular event.

I also went with teams 1-4 for "top tier" and 5-24 for "depth." I figure it's really hard to win a regional if there are already four super teams signed up - it means you'd likely either have to be better than one of those teams, or win through a super alliance of two of those teams. And I did 5th-24th to include all of the teams that would seem, on paper, to be most likely to reach elims. I think the 5th-24th average in particular is less misleading with that small baseline adustment described above.

Originally Posted by Nathan Streeter

Thank you very much for all your data work and for posting these charts... they're very interesting! Any shot you could upload your .xls to another location so we can download it and tinker?

I'll see if I can figure out how to host it on my website. Beware; the spreadsheet is a sprawling mess in some ways. But it does have a bunch of knobs to turn for people who are so inclined.