I’ve spent the past few days compiling the data on how each team attended the Championship qualified to get there. I did so to take a look at how well teams of each qualification method did at the Championship, but I noticed that the data tells a story of its own. You can see the full data in the CD-Media paper, but the below graph summarizes it all quite well.
Even though the Championship has been growing larger, the number of open spots is growing smaller and smaller. Note the dive of the % of registered teams. With new regionals each year, FRC is going to have to make difficult choices on who gets to go to the Championship and who doesn’t.
How do you handle teams that qualified multiple ways? for example, a team might win the competition AND earn Chairman’s, or a Hall of Fame team might also be regional winners.
If a team qualified in more than one way (e.g. Hall of Fame team wins a Regional), the team is listed twice. Teams attending the CMP that did not qualify in any way were assumed to have Registered, so if I missed any qualification method, that’s where they’d be included. All the 2012 Einstein Teams were included in 2013’s “Last Year’s Winners.” Championship Qualification in 2004 included a point system based on 2003 performance; I ignored it and assumed any point-based qualifiers simply Registered.
So for the sake of knowing, a district win was not counted into this data? Only a regional win which I’m assuming MSC counts as a regional in the data?
You’re correct. A district win does not qualify a team for the Championship, so they were not counted. Winning MSC or the MAR CMP was counted as a “regular” regional win. District Chairman’s, EI, and RAS Awards were treated the same way.
Now there’s an interesting question. Same way, multiple times is double-counted (or triple-counted, etc.), except in 2013. I pulled the 2013 data separately (used data I already had from weeks ago). And apparently removed duplicates. I don’t know why I did that. A corrected graph is attached. The primary difference is the number of Regional Winning teams, which is about 7% higher. This shows even more emphatically the effect of more regionals on the sustainability of the current qualification model.
P.S. Corrected data for 2013 has been added to the CD-Media page.
Now that you’ve done that, I can clearly see the effect of adding new district systems on the regional winners. The only times that percentage goes down are 2008-09 and 2011-12, when MSC and MAR started, respectively.
Today, I updated the data in the paper referenced above. The trends shown make it abundantly clear that FIRST didn’t have much of a choice in their recent decision to expand the CMP. The new graph is attached to this post.
I attached a second graph (qualification methods grouped) because it shows another interesting trend. Up until two years ago, there were about as many culture-changing teams as teams that qualified using their robot. In the past two years, the % of “robot teams” at the CMP has quickly outpaced “culture teams.” The causes for this are obvious, but the effect is quite dramatic.
And, because I was playing with a new toy and needed a data source, I created an interactive version of this. I wanted to see how much of CMP got in solely on culture awards. But clicking on the various methods toggles them on or off.
