Strongest Regionals/District 2016?

[Andrew Schreiber]

Originally Posted by cadandcookies

Well, they were fine when 254 decided to visit in 2014, so, barring things I'm unaware of (of which there are many), I don't see 148 being in the mix shaking up 2056's chances of keeping their streak alive significantly.

There are a lot of ways to quantify "competitive". To me, it boils down to two questions: How difficult is it to win an event and how difficult is it to play Saturday (or Sunday) afternoon at an event. I'm not sure what the best way to quantify each of those is (and I'm pretty sure better minds than mine have tried), but it seems to me that one could come up with a number of statistics that might correlate to "competitiveness" at a regional.

I'm also not sure many of the previous posts in this thread are what I would say are most competitive overall. Perhaps in a given region, yes, but I wouldn't be likely to put one of our MN regionals on the same level as many Michigan District events, or even Wisconsin Regional, which always seems to be very deep, even if the ceiling isn't as high as places like Waterloo. It's quite difficult to make a judgement on the whole however, when I, like many people, only really have a strong knowledge of regionals in my area.

This is one of those questions I've been trying to figure out for a while. So, I've actually built out a system to provide what I'm calling a Dynasty rating for teams. It's effectively based on the team's ability to play in the afternoon. I've assigned winning an event as 100 points. From there, each level is divided by the number of alliances reaching it. (Finalist 50, SF 25, QF 12.5) I also reverted towards the mean by 5% each year to help offset teams that had a great year in like 2006 and haven't been consistent.[1] I've also added a minimum threshold of 5 events, teams are derated accordingly prior to that because they are unknown. So, my theory is that this shows an overall ability to play in eliminations.[2] These were averaged over a year.

After that I started asking myself how I could quantify competitiveness of an event. Frankly, I enjoy watching an event where the winner isn't a known thing[3]. So I did a bit of research, for those of you unfamiliar with the Gini Coefficient, it's a measure of income disparity in nations. But, at it's core, it's a measure of equality of distribution. So, I got to wondering if I could leverage the math behind it to find events with lots of close teams.


Ok, this post is dragging on a lot longer than I wanted it to, so the TLDR - you can, it's actually fairly simple math given a sorted array. So, by week, the most "exciting"[4]:

(If they were real close (within a hundredth) I included the top 2

Week 1

Guilford County 	 2016ncmcl 	
Kettering University 	 2016miket

Week 2

Tippecanoe 	 2016inwla
Central Valley 	 2016cama

Week 3

Walker Warren 	 2016inwch

Week 4

Central Maryland 	 2016mdedg

Week 5

Hartford 	 2016cthar

Week 6 [5]

Pine Tree 	 2016melew

This was all based on every official event from 2006 to present. [6]


I'm tired, but if folks want the other order I can do that tomorrow.

[1] Number felt right, not really based on much than the that.
[2] Spot checking teams felt right. In theory there's prolly a way of using this for Fantasy FIRST type stuff.
[3] Almost known thing... whatevs
[4] Read as, events with the lowest Gini coefficient since 0 would be perfectly equal distribution.
[5] Actually, NCCMP was flagging as the most even this week, but since it's a qualify only event I assume it's a TBA bug?
[6] Which surprises absolutely nobody that I have...