FRC Blogged-Standard District Point Structure

[GaryVoshol]

To add to Jim's points, it's not hard to pick out the top teams who should advance. Even with 15 districts this year, I'm sure there will be general consensus that these 10 or 15 teams absolutely deserve to be at MSC. (Yes, sometimes circumstances could gang up on a "good" team and they don't qualify, but that's rare.)

The hard part is deciding who's in 60th place and gets to go, and who's 61st and is staying home. (Adjust numbers accordingly depending on how many advance, how many auto-advancers, declines, etc.)

Judges in FLL have the same quandary when they are deciding who advances from qualifiers. The top 2-4 teams are obvious. But who is 8, 9, 10? And who is 11 and doesn't advance?

[Nemo]

I agree with leaving it the way it is to put the focus on getting the best separation among the teams on the bubble of qualifying or not.

I did think it was an interesting idea to split the elimination round points a bit for teams that take one of the matches. If the split was 8 / 2 in a 2-1 series instead of 10 / 0 for a 2-0 series, that wouldn't seem unreasonable to me.

[Jessica Boucher]

Jim's also missing the age incentive, but all the points made earlier are still valid.

That being said, I think it is great that the model is being questioned, so keep questioning! That's why we went through the whole process of creating our own model in NE in the first place: to iterate on what we thought was good and improve in places that we thought needed it. Because of this, we were able to get to a model that felt more unified and represented all of FRC.

I think the biggest reason why we must sort is when it comes to invitations to the DCMP and the CMP. Teams may decline to either event, and thus the invitation list can get very deep. As Jim said: Do good things, advance.