ChampionSplit: A Historical Perspective

[Siri]

Honest question: do high school sports teams that win say, the Mid-Atlantic Championship (or your geographic equivalent) bill themselves as "national quarterfinalists" or however many peer regions there are in the US for that sport? I've never seen anything like that, but I honestly don't know. This seems like a very bizarre debate if there's no precedent.

Originally Posted by JimInNJ

I'm still having trouble understanding why FRC teams expect to send 20-25% of the entire league to the top level championship event. Please explain it to someone on the outside looking in.

This is an excellent question, and one many of us have been asking for a long time. What HQ actually says is "we want more kids to feel the passion and power that comes with being a part of FIRST Championship events." (This is from the announcement and is echoed elsewhere.) Unfortunately, they've translated this as "every kid needs to get to CMP no matter how many kids there are", instead of "we should make more tiers of events more inspiring". This is unfortunate not because I'm against the split, but because it's foundationally less scalable than the alternative. It's also weird from a historical perspective, because while every team could theoretically get in every four years if they manage to maintain the 25% number forever, that means 3 poor teams out there are hoping that 254 misses Worlds 3 of every 4 years. I have trouble imagining what Worlds would really be like if HQ actually enforced the prospect of getting in every team every four years.

Does anyone have a way to generate numbers on how close we've gotten to that "goal" for the era in which the rate was around 25%? ...And Blake, I disagree. We're straying some (okay, occasionally a lot), but the general trend is towards comparing historical aspects of champs to the present and future. I don't see this as a particularly big jump from the thread OP or title, but you're welcome to bring up a topic of interest to you that's closer (or the same distance away).