In stark contrast to last year, the weather looks good next weekend. I’m excited to wait in line at the awesome food trucks outside without being drenched.
There is a 5-way tie at 53 district points, and with the first tiebreaker being playoff performance points, 555 is the only one of those teams who initially qualified.
The first ones out are 5624, 2577, 8117, and 365. If some teams decline their invitations, they could still be invited. Of interest is 365, a Hall of Fame team who has up until now attended every MAR/FMA District Championship since 2014 and every World Championship since their rookie season in 2000. They are not signed up for Worlds this year. While these streaks have a high probability of being broken this season, I hope they can come back swinging next year. I’ll say that when I was in high school, I was inspired by their HOF video when it was displayed on the big screen in Atlanta.
Anyway, from my team to yours, good luck and let’s have fun while we’re at Lehigh!
There’s a chance MOE can still get in if there are enough declines.
I know certain catholic schools are not attending because it’s Easter weekend. For non-FMA people reading this thread, FMA is giving those teams extra points to make up for being unable to attend the district championship. The teams had to commit to this before the season began.
Both 2607 and 5684 have publicly said that they will not attend Lehigh, so with only two more declined spots MOE would still qualify.
I don’t have a list of which teams have opted in to this system so I can only guess at the other teams. Other christian schools in the top 60 right now include 272, 433, 1279, 4652, 4653, 7045 and 8714. Again, I have no information on what any of those teams have decided to do.
1712 is excited to return to FMA DCMP. With the cancellations in 2020 and 2021 and us not qualifying last year, this will be the first time any of our current students have been able to compete at this level, so anticipation is high. We’re looking forward to seeing teams we’ve haven’t in a few years (namely all y’all Northern Jersey folks).
One of the things I’m personally most excited about is the rookies in attendance this year. MAR isn’t exactly a hotbed of rookie growth typically, with a pretty high team density and a lot of veteran programs. But this year bucks that trend, with six rookies qualifying to compete with their robots at DCMP. Four of those six have reached the finals at least once this year, with 9015 (ranked all the way up at 15th in the district) doing so twice (including one event win). 9094 was even an alliance captain and won a non-rookie award (Creativity) at Bensalem.
Fifteen teams are confirmed to have opted out of DCMP due to school restrictions/religious obligations. We don’t know the precise identities of the fifteen. I know a couple have told me they won’t be attending, but I don’t want to “leak” anything that they haven’t stated publicly. That being said, I think 365 is pretty comfortably going to be invited. If I had to predict, I think the cut-off will likely be around 51 points (which is also a 3-way tie).
433 confirmed on the FMA Discord that they have permission to attend.
8714 (just from a conversation with our alliance partners) are going to try to get it together to go, so it doesn’t seem as though they’d been previously boxed out / opted out back at the November deadline.)
I’ll be busy at TXCMP but I’ll be keeping my eye on FMA when I have spare time. I’ve seen a lot of instructive play coming out of FMA playoffs so I’m excited to see what’s up at the DCMP field.
For anyone that doesn’t want to cross reference a list against a list:
Looks like (7) Teams Total Qualified for DCMP and had opted out in advance, next (7) teams would appear to be ranks 61 through 67 which would be: 5624, 2577, 8117, 365, 486, 303, and 6921.**
Considering the timing of all of this (Though kudos to FMA for posting the “Official” Surrogate List at 1am and not 9am, meaning people can get on this first thing in the actual morning) - I wouldn’t be surprised if we saw the list pull down into the 70’s to fill the event.***
**Not official until posted elsewhere, I’m just someone on the internet staring at lists at 2am
***I’m assuming that with this upcoming weekend being a holiday, and the event start being 2.5 days away, not all of the teams on the “next up” list will be able to pull off the logistics to compete in time, but who knows.
Does anyone know why the surrogate DCMP formula divides the average performance at districts by 2? Are we assuming teams perform about half as well at DCMP as they would at a district? Not a bad assumption, just curious.
(To pre-empt potential confusion, it’s not because it’s calculating the average. It calculates the average and then divides by 2 again.)
It looks like based on feedback some analysis was done that found that this formula “more accurately matched historical results”.
Without doing any analysis myself, on an intuitive level it makes sense that teams would do half as well at district champs compared to a normal district event. Lehigh contains roughly the top half of teams in the region, so it makes sense that individual teams would roughly do half as well.
It’s not an exact match, the very best teams at Lehigh would get close the maximum ~73sh points (x3) at Lehigh and also get the same ~73ish points at a district event. The lowest ranked team at Lehigh would get ~4 points (x3) at the district championship, but would have needed to get 25-30 points at each of their district events to qualify. For teams in between those two extremes this seems like an okay system though, and those are the teams where qualification to Houston matters.
I’ve copied this list below, ordered by district points.
Team
DE1
DE2
SUR_DCMP
AGE
District Points
DCMP
2607
46
44
67.5
0
157.5
Qualified
1279
43
36
59.25
0
138.25
Qualified
272
27
39
49.5
0
115.5
Qualified
4653
37
29
49.5
0
115.5
Qualified
9100
33
22
41.25
10
106.25
Qualified
5684
24
34
43.5
0
101.5
Qualified
4652
22
35
42.75
0
99.75
Qualified
87
22
27
0
0
49
1626
14
28
0
0
42
8513
7
25
0
5
37
1168
13
23
0
0
36
5438
13
23
0
0
36
5992
12
20
0
0
32
4750
9
11
0
0
20
1989
7
9
0
0
16
In the spirit of cross-referencing lists against lists, I was wondering which of these teams have a chance of competing at the Championship Event in Houston. Last year’s point cutoff (link to rankings) was between 156 and 171 points, which would appear to mean that only 2607 has a chance of qualifying and all of the other teams are on the outside looking in. I would appreciate any further analysis on this subject as last year’s rankings are probably not the best heuristic for figuring this sort of thing out.
I did a quick “Look through” the numbers from last year, and at a glance, somewhere around 1.5x is a reasonable “Rule of thumb” for most teams that are not multiple event winners / finalists going in. (So more or less, somewhere around rank 18 in 2022, it starts to get close)
It’s also worth pointing out that the allotment needs to be fair, and not specifically advantageous to a team - since if it were the full 3x, why not opt out of DCMP to save the headache if you’re one of the top 10 or so in points going in.
(Also even at 1.5x, odds are, any of the top 6-8 teams could still qualify for the CMP based on their incoming averages, if anything, it’s actually better for some of them, historically).
Double post because you beat me to the reply button.
Historically, at least in FMA, the ~200pt barrier has always been the “Safe Spot” for a CMP Slot, though most years usually drop down to somewhere between 150-175 as you noted. It really all comes down to award distribution relative to Winning Alliance Members (Anyone who “Double Taps” creates a points spot) and how many points the winning alliance manages to “Suck Out” as they make their way through Eliminations.
If we assume some high (probably, 2/3?) chance that a winning alliance or finalist alliance member qualifies once on points and a second time via award, and that someone (like 341) is likely going to pass along their spot from FMA, then I’d imagine this year would be no different than previous years.
The curveball would be if the right alliance of “Not District Event Winners” got together and won outright. Then the points distribution gets a bit more flat.
I looked more into the numbers and it definitely seems like 272 is the team that is missing out the most. After earning 27 district points at Hatboro-Horsham and 39 district points at Seneca, they absolutely balled out at Bensalem by ranking 1st overall, winning the event, and also winning EI. However, they didn’t receive district points for their third play, and their other two plays plus the surrogate formula didn’t generate enough district points to get them near qualifying for Worlds on points. They can still qualify by winning EI at district champs, since they will be interviewing remotely.
The main reason I say they’re missing out is that 272 is the most likely team on the list of opt-outs to be picked for playoffs at DMCP. Statbotics ranks them 12th in the district in EPA, ahead of 834 and 1403. Given their stats, I think it’s pretty much guaranteed that they would be picked at DCMP if they attended.
The other team on Worlds radar from the opt-out list, 2607, is ranked 19th in the district per Statbotics EPA and so also would probably be picked if they were in attendance. It’s not as clear cut as 272, but still likely.
Moving on down the list, 1279 is ranked 25th in the district in EPA. They would have an uphill battle to get picked but wouldn’t be out of the running entirely.
To Contextualize this - not that I’m debating that 272 and 2607 are both (2) of the most competitive teams in the region not making it to DCMP - but if we look at 2022 Points from District Championship, we see that their points aren’t too far off from what one could expect to see from a team who makes it into Eliminations, but does not make it past any points awarding rounds.
Example case here is 834 in 2022 - Ranked 4Xth in Quals, Selected 10th Overall, Won Judges award: 63 Points.
The accuracy of this all depends on how we want to play out our respective simulations - but I would say for a blind estimate made before any of the robots were built or the game was known - it’s not terrible. Especially considering that when/if the method is applied to a higher event average, that higher event average generally trends to track with some of the point allotments from 2022 DCMP.
(For example, if one were to have a 60pt Average going into DCMP, that would be 90+ points using the surrogate method, which would have ranked 15th (ish) overall in terms of points at DCMP - putting you at a full season total of 210pts, without ever having set foot on DCMP Carpet, which generally tracks.)
Also, the 1.5x method is just enough to dance around the “Where did the points come from” line of questioning. In the case of really high ranked teams going into DCMP, it really doesn’t matter much since those teams already have so many points and would likely points qual for DCMP as is. But if we used the 3x Method, suddenly, teams with say, 40pt averages would now be in automatically qual for WCMP - since they would end with ~200pts, even though those 120 points earned “From DCMP” come into existence via an exception case and do weird things with the value of points awarded at the DCMP.
What you’re saying makes a lot of sense. I agree that the 1.5x method works the best, and I wasn’t trying to say that 272 is missing out because of it. Rather, I was saying that 272 is missing out because their current amount of district points is not representative of their robot’s potential. Thus, they would have a much higher chance of qualifying for Worlds if they attend Lehigh, but they can’t.
2607 is not in the same situation. Their district points are more representative of their robot’s potential, so I would guess that their chance of qualifying for Worlds would be about the same whether or not they attend DCMP. This means that, roughly, the 1.5x method is working.
Agreed, I may have overly supported/hashed out why the 1.5x method makes sense based on discussions I’ve had outside of this thread - specifically why having it this way is vaguely the best way to handle such a situation without requiring some massive amount of man power to do pseudo-accurate simulations of performance / without penalizing a team who has a truly “breakout” season yet can’t attend DCMP due to external scheduling constraints.
Regardless, it’ll be interesting to see how the final list works out, considering those who have already declined, and the number of rookies that may be in attendance. Could look much different than previous years.
