Serpentine Draft

[scottandme]

Originally Posted by themccannman

Strictly going from value added to an alliance by a robot, 1st picks are orders of magnitude more valuable than what's available for 2nd picks.

That's the crux of the argument that you missed - at small/shallow/district events this year, the gap between the #1 pick and the #8 pick is smaller than the gap between the #9 pick and the #16 pick. Pick another robot with a 2 ball autonomous? No purpose, since you can only start with 3 balls. Pick another high goal scorer? No purpose, only 1 robot is going to be the finisher. But the dropoff between the #8 pick (16th overall) and the #16 pick (24th overall) can be the difference between a solid inbounder that can play shutdown defense, and one that can't. That level of dropoff didn't matter the last two years - it does this year. That's where the origin of the thread came from - at small/shallow/district events, the "dropoff" is real, and promotes the possibility of throwing matches to not fall victim to it.