pic: Alliance Scores Over the 2011 FRC Season

[Jim Zondag]

The attached Graph shows the distribution of individual team's season OPRs for the 2011 Season.
The trend you see here is pretty typical and is important when doing game analysis and strategy: Typcially about 25% of FRC population has a season contribution of 0 or less (26% in 2011). The 50% population point is much lower than you think. This has been the case in 2008, 2010, and 2011 since the GDC got "penalty happy". (2009 was an exception with only about 5% being negative, but the distributions are the same, just shifted to the right). The average scores per team increases quickly as teams play more events: Last year the OPR average by experience trend was 6.1, 18.0, 27.7, 34.4, 39.2, for 1-5 events played. Notice that it nearly triples going from 1 event to 2.
The performance distibution follows a roughly Gamma distirbution for all the teams and is very assymetrical. Last year 532 teams have net contribution at or below zero, while only 112 teams were at 30 or higher.
However, this function changes dramatically the more teams play.
If you can achieve half of the season maximum at your first event (OPR of 35 last year), you will be in the top 5% or so in the world at the beginning. If you keep this same level of performance, by your 3rd event you will only be barely above average relative to other teams with the same level of experience.