Strongest regional competitions

[Anupam Goli]

Originally Posted by AGPapa

AP Poll Preseason top 5 teams:
Florida State
Alabama
Oregon
Oklahoma
Ohio State

AP Poll Week 16 top 5 teams:
Alabama
Florida State
Oregon
Baylor
Ohio State

So the AP Poll went from Oklahoma being #4 to unranked, but other than that, the preseason polls seemed to do a pretty decent job. Four of the preseason top five were still in the top five at the end.

Don't look just at the top 5, look at the top 25. Also, does anyone else remember the fiasco that was Texas A&M beating South Carolina and rocketing up to top 5? That's what I mean by how these rankings are unnecessary.


Back to the point at hand:

So sure, you can't account for every factor (like student, mentor and sponsor loss), but preseason predictions can still do a fairly decent job. Good teams tend to be good from year to year. What are the chances that every team at a regional will be worse than the year before? Pretty slim. Some teams will get worse, but others will get better.

I agree with this. Part of what we do in Fantasy FIRST is try to predict who will do well on the field and with chairmans. Sometimes unpredictable things can happen, but for the most part things in FRC are pretty stable.

[XaulZan11]

Originally Posted by AGPapa

The Waterloo regional will be one of the more competitive ones next year. Only two of the teams attending were not in eliminations at any event last year.

But only 26 teams at Waterloo made eliminations last year and I'd suspect many of those made it at Waterloo, which likely was one of the easier events to get picked at.

[rsegrest]

Originally Posted by JB987

I can't remember a week one as loaded as Dallas is this year...everyone has their work cut out for them for sure.

I humbly submit to you the past two years of Lone Star Regional compared to Dallas this year...

LSR 2013 LSR 2014 Dallas 2015

57 57 57
118 118 118
148 148 148
192 231 457
231 418 624
418 441 647
441 457 704
457 624 932
624 653 987

Above are the oldest ten teams listed from each regional. They have much in common (simply a side-by-side comparison in Excel). Been there to play with them. Makes for an exciting competition no matter what week it occurs

P.S. Sorry for the lousy formatting. Couldn't get it to space out for easier reading.