Ideas to move in the direction of making FIRST competitions 'fair'

[Donut]

Originally Posted by Stephen Kowski

i don't know if I buy it....in our rookie year we went and won at the Peachtree Regional as a rookie with almost no money. I see teams all the time that I know (since I talk with them) don't have a lot of resources build great, competitive machines. Also, I have seen some big money teams squander their resources and end up building a machine that isn't indicative of all their support. I think there are some hasty generalizations being made in this post that may or may not necessarily be accurate. Please consider this as you try to "make competitions more fair" because I think there is an issue with the problem statement that was given.

On this point, perhaps any "fairness" system would need to address just making it easier for a team who is not doing as well (a 4-6 or 2-8 kind of team) to get into the playoffs, rather than making it easier for a team because they're a rookie, have less funding, or whatever. If you assume all these types of teams need help you will end up assisting those who are already doing good in the current system as well as those struggling, and that's not the idea behind this. If you go off of how a team is doing at the competition you can make sure it is the struggling teams (or at least struggling in competition that year) that are getting helped more, regardless of what type of team they are.

I expect any system to have limitations though. I don't think any kind of system could be remotely fair and still give an 0-XX team a good shot at the playoffs short of allowing every team in the playoffs, and that would just extend to the already crammed regional schedules (could you imagine the Championship like that?).