From Central Valley. How does this alliance even come together, much less win the tournament?
Wow.
Very, **VERY **good scouting. Someone give a cookie to each member on 254’s scouting team. Not many other 1st seeded teams would pick the 43rd ranked team as their first pick.
And also, remember who won the 2011 FRC World Championship together.
Just like 2056 in 2012, picking 1114 (IIRC, 73rd place?). It’s your reputation. (being good friends helps too!)
But that second pick meshed really well, really good job on that pick.
If you have good scouts, that number that everyone else calls “rank” is irrelevant (unless that number is <16).
I wouldn’t call it irrelevant. As a matter of fact, it roughly correlates with winning potential and assist potential. But if you have the real numbers, it probably doesn’t matter too much.
I would go as far as to say that rank is completely irrelevant. At this years san diego regional the alliance captain that ended up choosing the sixth seeded team had a robot that could barely move, but were exceedingly lucky with their match schedule. Note that my team also too had the same thing occur to it in 2009 where we were ranked 4th. Yet for the last four years i can not remember playing more than once with a power house team more than once per year. There is no easy way to fix the problem other than completely changing the ranking structure. Teams that do not scout due to the fact they know they wont be top eight, but end up being lucky leads them to choose solely on rank, and teams that dont have exceptional scouts also pick teams baded solely on rank, or maybe a good match with them. Scouting is extremely difficult due to the amount of time it takes to go through each and every single one of the matches ar least six times to view each robot, there almost isnt enough time to do that. The ranking might never change, but that only rncourages teams to be better scouts.
That was a job very well done by the scouting team. They managed to select teams that were very well suited for their strategy. This is something that I hope my team is able to emulate. I would be very interested to see what kind of sheets they used and how they obtained their data to pick teams that many would have overlooked.
A great team chooses the partners needed to play their strategy in the most effective way possible. Ranking doesn’t matter when you look at it from this perspective.
There are many ways a low ranked team can be the perfect fit for a strategy or alliance and good scouting is keyed in to identifying these factors that you need to win the game.
Intra-alliance synergy is paramount in this game.
A significant portion of the points in this game are being scored in auto, and consequently rank probably tracks best with auto scoring ability. 254 had their 3 ball auto, so a reliable scoring machine in auto was not high on their priority list.
Instead, to maximize teleop points, they needed to choose a team they could build a synergy with. For that, 973 makes perfect sense. They’ve worked together many times before, including winning a world championship together.
Also goes to show that your pick list should not be final after your Friday night meeting. The list is always dynamic, and should only be close to final after the last qualification.
Good scouting always trumps rank. On Newton in 2012, 68 picked 330 (24th seed) and 639 (89th seed), to form an alliance that could triple balance in less than 5 seconds and went on to be Division Finalists.
Here you go;
Rank does not correlate well at all to desirability for picking, this year, due to the different alliance dynamic required by Aerial Assault. In past years, teams’ contributions on an alliance have largely been additive; for example, if your robot scores 20 frisbees per match on average, and you pick a team that typically scores 10, you could count on scoring somewhere around 30 in eliminations.
Not so this year – you pick robots that fill out a third of the particular cycle type you want to run in eliminations. Rank wasn’t a factor at all this year in 254’s scouting process. I only discovered 973 was ranked 43rd when I was idly looking at the standings while waiting for alliance selections to start, and I only found out 2135 was ranked 41st when I saw this thread. 
Much more important are the ability to not commit fouls, pleasantness of working with your team if we have a qualification match together, and ability to quickly intake and release a ball.
That same year, 254 was in the very same position on Curie, where they were in the 53rd place, yet 341 (the 1st seed) took a chance on them as their first pick. I don’t think 254 forgot that one.
This once again shows how important it is to keep updating the picklist through Saturday morning.
This reminds me of Waterloo last year.
We were having robot problems right through the first day of quals and were sitting right near the bottom of the rankings. Finally on Saturday morning we got all of our kinks ironed out and suddenly were running 4+ cycles, with upwards of 90% accuracy, with a 10pt hang at the end.
610 (second alliance captain) picked us as their 3rd partner. Given our overall stats, that’s about where we expected to go; however, with our Saturday morning performance, we were a steal.
We ended up losing in the finals to the 1114 and 2056 alliance, but it wasn’t the usual blowout that Waterloo is used to seeing. If I recall correctly (might have just been one of them), 610 and 1310 were both having issues with their full court shooters.
610 has an incredible scouting/strategy team. The attention to detail that goes into their scouting is crazy. Fantastic team to be on an alliance with!
Objectively speaking we were at worst the third best performing/highest scoring robot in Curie in 2012…we just couldn’t get anyone to co-op with us. The situation with 987 picking us in SD last year was much more apt.
I think this year you will see many low “ranked” teams win a competition. The ranking system is based off a game that has to do with co-operation, if your alliances partners do not co-operate then it is likely that you will lose, it is up to those people scouting to find the best teams to pick and this year it may be at the bottom of the standings.
The ranking system this year can be a blessing and a curse.
I can attest to good scouting. At CIR this year, my team ranked 34th our of 40 was selected by the #1 alliance. There were many good teams remaining that 525 passed on to select us due to our defense and assisting.
Synergy is extremely important. Also, having the #1 and #3 seeded teams on our alliance did not hurt.
All this talk of picking based on performance rather than actual rank reminds me of 2009 in Galileo when we picked up 971 as the last pick in the draft as an absolute steal. They were seeded 66 out of 86, but their record definitely didn’t reflect their capabilities. Good scouting should never be taken for granted.