I’m a sports fan, and in sports there tends to be a bunch of people that perform a lot better in the playoffs than the regular season. Whether it’s Tom Brady or LeBron James, these people elevate themselves to new levels of competition under the added pressure the playoffs provide.
My question is, what teams do you know of in the FRC that do the same thing? The team that immediately comes to mind for me is 3476. During their history, they only have won two regionals. However, they have won their division four times in the last six seasons.
One team that sticks out in our region is 2168. In the last three years they’ve consistently made deep runs on Saturdays at Districts or the DCMP. IIRC they’ve made it to the finals at 9/11 of the last fields they played on before Champs. Eight of those ended with a banner.
No matter how many nights you hear or see them working hands deep in their robots during Load In or Day 1 of quals they always hit elims on all cylinders.
2471 in the last two seasons has gone off in eliminations in the PNW district most notably at 2018 DCMP. They just seemed to play perfectly when pressure and odds are at the peek, kudos to their team and drivers.
Wave Robotics 2826 is a team that never fails to destroy in elims, no matter their performance in quals. In fact, they are so effective and often turn around their performance so quickly and drastically that it’s a running joke on our team that they sandbag. They did this so effectively in fact, that they were able to come from 14th as a First Pick of the 8th alliance and beat the 1st seeded alliance (1986 and 1756, very good teams) 2-0 and went on to win the regional. It was absolutely incredible.
“[strike]118[/strike] [strike]469[/strike] 20 looks terrible today…”
“Ahh… it doesn’t matter, it’s Friday. They’ll be punching hard when it really counts.”
I think there are a few common traits of some of those you have to watch out for:
Viable solutions that appear to require tuning.
Inconsistent behavior with large upswings.
History of strategic insight and understanding of how to play for the W (which for some years is different than trying to play to qualify high).
As far as 217 goes, I had a subconscious reaction to the song Thunderstruck for many years.
I believe that most of these teams take a long view to the season. IE, they think about what sort of robot design will go deep into the playoffs. This often puts a handful of non-obvious, and often difficult to integrate elements that can cause the teams to not be ready in time for early in the season.
I would say these teams also often have a drive for continuous improvement (not continuous tinkering). For instance, 217 had a very good robot all this year. At MSC, they rebuilt the elevator to have a 3rd stage because they had the time, and they believed the extra stack height would pay off (and arguably it did pay off quite well for them). These late season modifications are not for the feint of heart. As an LRI, I have observed these sort of rebuilds cripple a team just as often as I have seen them help a team. A lot has to do with the team, their preparation, and their experience in doing such mods.
While the folks on CD could fill a thread with teams/years the changes were effective, there is an equal heap of efforts that resulted in robots going into the dumpster.
Can completely agree with this. We tried to make several mods to our bot this year. Every competition except our first we tried to upgrade. Despite this, we performed our best at our first regional. We eventually took off every upgrade we had made at the WOW Championship off-season and remained in the top 8 ranked OPR bots. My advise is if you try to upgrade, put your upgrades on a close to identical practice bot. The overall results can be much different than expected if the upgrade is untested…
217 is always great on saturdays. Hopefully we will get to see them in the finals at Pittsburgh next year.
“[strike]118[/strike] [strike]469[/strike] 20 looks terrible today…”
“Ahh… it doesn’t matter, it’s Friday. They’ll be punching hard when it really counts.”
