pic: 2016 Championship Alliance Selection Rates by Qualification Type

[Chris is me]

Originally Posted by IKE

So, it makes sense if you look at the probability of the two roles. You can end up in the #1 spot as a decent, but not the top performing team. In fact you may be not even a top 10 team at an event.
That first pick is almost always the top or 2nd from the top (when top team is #1).

I know when doing the initial points proposal for FiM, being the "first pick" at an event had the highest correlation with being most competitive and/or most likely to win during a season.

What would be really interesting is to see this chart from 2009 through about 2012. The district Points section would have been extremely high correlation through that time period.

Another factor to consider is that this year, being an alliance captain required a slightly different skill set than being the consistently highest scoring team at the competition. Being able to guarantee breach and capture inflated the ranks of particular classes of robots, particularly highly mobile low goal scorers, so more of them were top seeds. This is in addition to the normal variance caused by strength of schedule, strategy, reliability, etc.