I guess I need to make a comment. I really appreciate the show. I know it takes time and effort to do it and dedication to FIRST so thank you Mike and Justin for doing it. We had great fun last year with you after the little misspelling incident.
Our team was blessed this year to have great students, great mentors, great alumni, and GREAT alliance partners. We learned a lot from competing. It has been wonderful to see our kids inspired.
Top 25 is fun. I learn about teams I never have seen. Last year I was amazed with some of those teams at CMP. Let’s keep it fun. Vote if you wish. Watch the show by all means. Be proud of your teams!!
Banners and rankings are not why we do this. Inspiration is.
You all inspire me … Even after more than a decade of FIRST…
We will see you all in a couple of weeks and renew our friendships and
“Compete like crazy”.
1983 does quite a bit better in this regard:
1983— 25 (95)
But that uses week five data, not week six.
Edit: My mistake, it uses week six data. I assumed it used week 5 because it was posted in the week 5 OPR thread.
Thanks for voting to change that… oh wait… you didn’t. How can you complain that the rankings are garbage when you don’t vote yourself?! Who knows what your vote could have done to the rankings. “Be the change you want to see in the world…”
Justin and I have never claimed that these rankings are anywhere close to official. We have always said, the more voters, the more evened out it will be. We do this for fun; a way to talk robotics throughout the week, a time to share with other FIRST addicts, a way to laugh and have fun on a Wednesday night. The rankings are secondary to all of that.
But in other news. Thank you for all of the support guys. We can’t tell you how much we appreciate all the support and love. It means more than you will ever know. Thanks for giving us a reason to keep going.
More voters would imply more voters from across the country. Maybe the reason why 1983 wasn’t in the top 25 was because there’s not too many voters in the Pacific Northwest. Maybe why Southeastern US teams didn’t get many votes was because of the same reason. People tend to vote based on the teams they’ve seen. Maybe a Northeatern voter hasn’t watched must westcoast events. Maybe our voters are Michigan/MAR heavy. Who knows.
I know I’m not making much sense, but the logic is there. The more voters the better.
I did vote… In the coaches poll… and that was cancelled.
I love the concept of the show, my fault is with the voting process. Even if everyone informed votes, they will be drowned out tenfold by the rest of chiefdelphi. This was very evident in the 2011 rankings comparing the public vs. coaches poll.
You love the concept of the show yet you complain it’s a bunch of uninformed voting. Sounds to me like you don’t like the concept at all. It’s one of the biggest problems with democracy, the uninformed are equal to the informed.
Disclaimer — I agree which is why I don’t even pay much attention to where I rank/don’t rank.
Hey I just wanted to let everyone know I disagree with the voting system for a peer poll that has no real impact and is just for fun, and because of this I’m pretty sure the teams I work on just aren’t going to enter robots next year. Anyone else want to join in? Protest! Protest!
Or we could wait for cooler heads to prevail. This is all just… I just can’t… sigh.
You’re right, I added the words morons because I was thinking it. My apologies. I’ll edit the post.
So you like he idea of a Top25 but not the idea of the uninformed voting on it. How would you suggest ranking them? Numeric methods probably won’t work due to differences in regional strengths. Finding a group of “informed” won’t work since there’s no real defined qualification.
In 2011 a coaches poll was run side by side with the public poll. I forget who all the coaches were, but this concept worked and both top 25’s were displayed.
It’d also be awesome to implement a pure statistical top25 w/ FIM style points that are standardized to cover different # of matches played.
If a public, coach, and statistical ranking were done, a combined ranking of the three could also be done.
Mike/Justin, any chance you could contact the folks you had doing the voting in 2011 and collect lists from them? (or pass the list my way and I’ll do it)
I’ll have the TwentyFour guys work up a FiM style point list, an OPR, and a CCWM list. (Yes Drost, that means you too)
In CFB they just take the ranking from the three systems and average it then use that as your rank.
With the coaches poll in CFB they try to get a wide sampling of coaches from different parts of the country, different skill levels, different play styles etc to get a good sample. This is probably best for FRC too because a lot of coaches don’t have enough time to watch every team in every region, but they will tend to chart their own region well and you’ll get a relative comparison with more well known teams
The data portion seems pretty easy to do with the provided twitter data and someone entering awards.
You didn’t vote this week which in turn gives you no right to complain about how the votes turned out this week. That is like complaining that we picked the wrong president but you didn’t vote. If you give up your right/ ability to vote you also give up your right to complain about it.
The problem with the coaches polls are that these “experts” can’t be experts every week some weeks their competing other weeks their working at their own jobs. Its just as hard for them to see all the teams compete as it is anyone else. Many times the coaches polls were skewed based on what regional they were at and what teams they saw play.
This wouldn’t make them more insight full never has the claim been made that these top 25 should top your pick list. Its just a voter generated list of some teams that are playing this years game really really good. If you have some time to look at these teams we could all learn something from them.
More voters would help to balance out the regional bias. If we currently have 70% of the votes coming for the east coast, more overall voters would result in more people from the west coast or any other region. This would help to remove these “favorite” regions. Everyone is mentioning these “regional bias” but most people are failing to mention that Texas has the second most teams in the Top 25, and there are no NE teams.
Ranking teams based on performance numbers is easy to do, it takes some work to general all the necessary data but after that all you have to do is sort the teams. The point of the show is for fun, its just a fun ranking that isn’t just a set of numbers read off a spreadsheet. Sure we could use OPR but i think everyone would agree that if we had done this last year the Top25 would have been really skewed.
The reason why we stopped this was because the “coaches” simply stopped participating. By week 3 we were getting nearly 100 voters for the public poll and 3 -5 for the “coaches” poll. We started with over a dozen coaches. Which one was a better representation of the Top 25 teams according to the FIRST community? The public poll. Simple as that. And that’s the model we’re going to continue using.
I’m fine with people not taking the rankings seriously. Mike already stated the reason why we do the show is to bring the FIRST community together every week throughout the competition season. The rankings are secondary and merely give us a format for the show.
The BCS in college football is a computer generated model taking into account a number of factors. There are always people who complain about it’s inaccuracies. People complain about the coaches poll in college sports. People complain about the media poll in college sports.
Anytime you try and “rank” anything, people will complain and try to knock it’s credibility just because they have a different opinion. It is IMPOSSIBLE to rank over 2000 teams with a high degree of accuracy. That’s why we have always claimed it was for fun and not to take it too seriously. All we ask is that you vote. If you don’t want to vote that’s fine, we’ll have fun doing the show with or without you.
Get rowdy in chat and you’ll simply get banned. :rolleyes: :eek: