District Championship Projections

[MikeE]

I feel these suggested points thresholds are rather high.
To take the New England District as an example, 32 teams have now played both their scored events. If we just rank those 32 teams and cut the list at the same proportion that will go to District Champs (60 of 175) then we see that the 11th team has 70 points.
So if we assume that teams completing their two scoring events by week 3 are performing as a whole close to average, then the District Champ invitation threshold should be around 70 points.

However, as pointed out in previous years, teams that compete in their second event early tend to do much better than average since they are at a distinct advantage over other teams competing for the first time. We see this trend again, since the average score for all NE teams in their first event is 26.5pts, whereas the average for 2nd event teams is 36.0pts. This pattern is seen in all Districts at the end of Week 3. (There is also an argument that better teams compete early, but it has the same effect on the District Champs point threshold.)

District	Event 1		Event 2	
	#teams	#teams	Average	#teams	Average
FiM	327	303	25.3	49	31.0
IN	 49	 49	27.4	15	33.6
MAR	121	 98	26.3	11	35.9
NE	175	168	26.5	32	36.0
PNW	152	145	28.5	43	33.1

By the end of the season the averages for 2nd events are actually expected to be a little lower than 1st event averages, since teams are often also competing against non-point-scoring 3rd event teams at later events which reduces the points pool. So 2nd event scores will become progressively lower on average from Week 4 onward.

Therefore we can conclude that 70pts is highly likely an overestimate of the points needed to qualify for the NE District Champs. My current estimate is 63pts.