Some grim data, inspired by a conversation with @KennySandon…
There were 60 completed Regionals last year. These 60 Regionals, obviously, mean 60 2nd pick teams.
39 of 60 teams attended at least one additional regional event.
7 of 60 teams would have qualified for Champs otherwise.
That means that there are 53 teams who qualified for the Championship last year, as the 2nd pick of the winning alliance, who would not qualify under this year’s rules (without factoring in wild cards). Of course, wild cards would kick in and many would attend.
That’s a reduction of 57 slots when the recent blog post mentioned the need to cut 24 slots. I guess the question is if those 33 additional slots are being mostly allocated to Districts or to the priority waitlist, or somewhere else. I guess we’ll find out on November 13th.
If anyone has the data on regional vs. district team growth handy, that could be an interesting addition to this conversation.
There is the caveat that more wildcards should be given out this year, so maybe that’s part of the calculus. Anyone have burned wildcard numbers handy?
Data note: the 60 vs. 61 events is due to the number of scheduled events vs. the number of events that were actually played. I think .
Since first wildcard now goes to the 2nd pick of winning alliance, if there was even a single wildcard given out at that regional, it would have gone to them.
From TBA:
Week - regionals-without-wildcards-issued/regionals-held
Total regionals (one omitted, as it was not played): 60
Regionals where at least one wildcard was issued: 40
So, roughly 20 2nd-picks may not have qualified under the 2024 rules, were those applied to the 2023 season, as-is. I didn’t check which of them would have overlapped with the 7 who would have qualified otherwise.
As far as burnt wildcards, it’s a pretty difficult thing to figure out without diving deeper into the data. There was only one regional that gave out 4 wildcards (Iowa), but that doesn’t tell the whole story – if the finalists were already qualified, they would not be issued wildcards in the first place.
Why would there be more wildcards? I amAndyMark not sure I follow the logic. Wild cards generally require a merit based championship earlier in the season, there is 20% fewer of those this year.
The wildcard eligibility list is longer this year. It doesn’t directly generate more, but it does increase the cap on the number that can be generated – it goes from a theoretical max of 6 candidates to 15, or 4 to 11 (since backup teams may or may not have actually been added to alliances).
2024:
Winning Alliance 2nd pick,
Rookie All-Star Award Winner,
Winning Alliance backup team (if applicable),
Finalist Alliance Captain,
Finalist Alliance 1st pick,
Finalist Alliance 2nd pick,
Finalist Alliance backup team (if applicable)
3rd Place Alliance Captain,
3rd Place Alliance 1st pick,
3rd Place Alliance 2nd pick,
3rd Place Alliance backup team (if applicable)
4th Place Alliance Captain,
4th Place Alliance 1st pick,
4th Place Alliance 2nd pick,
4th Place Alliance backup team (if applicable)
2023:
Rookie All-Star Award Winner,
Winning Alliance backup team (if applicable),
Finalist Alliance Captain,
Finalist Alliance 1st pick,
Finalist Alliance 2nd pick,
Finalist Alliance backup team (if applicable).
It was easier, theoretically, to run out of teams to award wildcards to this year. For example, if 2 wildcards were supposed to be generated (e.g., 2 of the regional winners had already qualified), but, say, all of the Finalists had also pre-qualified (and there were no backup teams), Rookie All-Star would get the first wildcard, and the remaining wildcard would be “burned”.
That said, as I mentioned above, it requires a deeper dive to figure out how often this actually happened – and I really have no idea how often it did. Instead of just checking “did a particular regional generate at least 1 wildcard?”, there’s a bunch of cross-referencing to do.
Also, the fact that there were 5 slots that could generate wildcards in 2023 and there are 4 slots in 2024 probably means that fewer wildcards will be generated anyway.
I know of at least 1 that wouldn’t have been. We picked 1902 as our last pick in Orlando. Thanks to their Hall of Fame status they generated a Wild Card. I know it is rare for last picks to be the one generating a Wild Card but taking away 1 of the 5 teams who had the option to generate them I don’t think will be offset by the extension of the teams who can receive the Wild Card.
I’d be interested in seeing which California teams wouldn’t have made it to champs in 2023 with the 2024 criteria. Teams like 604 barely snuck in, and two of the top 50 teams in the world last year (581 and 4255) didn’t event secure a spot despite having consistently solid performances.
California teams continue to get stronger and stronger, as shown by the many division and championship winners from CA in 2022/2023. Seeing our overall qualifying slots go down is a real bummer, and I think will lower the overall competitiveness of the championship event significantly.
The reality for 2024 is that most 2nd picks aren’t actually going to get the short end of the stick. Regional Finalist captains and first picks will absolutely qualify at a lower rate than 2023 which is a shame, especially in CA where those teams would dominate in so many other events around the world.
We would have made it to champs last year as the winning alliance second pick ONLY because our alliance captain was a hall of fame team (987).
That same event gave a wildcard to 3476 (finalist captains). Under this year’s rules, Code Orange, the Galileo Division winners (with you all!), would not have gone to champs outside of a waitlist spot.
Yes and no so with 1 more team to get through only Pittsburgh would have had the chance to go further down the list.
However 1 of those wild cards at Pittsburgh was produced by Impact Winner 59, who got a wild card at Orlando thanks to 1902 generating said wildcard.
Under the new system 59 does not have their wild card, and the 2nd pick takes a wild card. So at none of these events does anyone extra earn a wild card spot.
That’s kind of what I figured – it nets fewer wildcards.
I regard 5 to be a pretty insignificant amount of wildcards burned, especially given that it’s really a range of 0-5. It doesn’t even come close to qualifying all of the remaining 2nd picks, let alone finalists. If I had gone through the same look and discovered there to be 20+ burnt wildcards…
(for the record, I greatly prefer the 2023 eligibility rules to 2022/2024 – I’m just trying to get an idea of the numbers)
I could be completely wrong about this, but i BELIEVE the first year our team went to houston (2019?) we wouldn’t have made it to houston with these new rules. Going to houston for the first time was what made us realize that we had a shot at being a more competitive team, without going that year i doubt we’re nearly as good now as we are… it’s sad to me other teams won’t get those kinds of “eye-opening” opportunities
I’m not sure the increase in wild card list length and reduction of slots are meant to balance each other. I don’t think anyone believes that it’s a bad thing to extend the list and since double eliminations worked out it makes sense to expand it.
For the sake of clarification 2 wild cards were generated at that event, 1 of them automatic and 1 from 330 previously winning Orange County.
The automatic wild card has not been a thing since 2020. So only 1 wild card would have been created
In the 2022 and 2024 rules you would not have gotten the ticket to champs as it would have gone to 2710 the 2nd pick of the winner.
In the 2023 rules you also would not have gotten it as it would have gone to Rookie All Star winner 7871. A team which existed for the single year and did not attend champs anyway. (I have ranted enough about RAS qualification in the past I won’t go deeper into it here)
I just wanted to be clear that the “new” rules did not result in a change to whether a team in your same position would qualify or not.
What did an automatic wild card do other than automatically let the first team on the wildcard list in? I’m not sure what the functional difference would be.
I mean yes, I wouldn’t expect the full reduction in team count to come from districts.
It is unlikely. On the other hand it wouldn’t surprise me to see an anomalous situation where it comes up and it will let one more team go to champs that wouldn’t have otherwise. It also preps that section of the rules for potential future increases in slots available (two champs?).
Exactly as advertised. It also increased the representation of qualifying regional teams at champs (over waitlisted teams).
Functionally, there isn’t really a difference. However, when you take that particular change (which was made last year as I recall) into conjunction with losing one guaranteed slot from the winning alliance, it’s actually going to make a pretty big change. I’m trying to keep this short and not do an explosive rant, but the very short version is that if you take the three 2019 events that I personally attended, which saw every single Finalist alliance member make it to Champs (10 teams, 2 via qualifying awards and 8 via wildcard), and apply the 2024 rules to that season…
…Exactly 2 Finalist alliance members make Champs. And for both of them, it’s the qualifying award that does it: Impact (3309 at L.A., skipped under 2019 rules), and RAS (7650 at Ventura, backup on Finalist alliance, didn’t get one anyways but would here).
2/10. That’s right, 2 of 10, and one of them directly qualified at a different event, so effectively 1 of 10. For years, the easiest way to get to Champs was to be Finalist at a regional–you didn’t have be one of the 2 best robots, or walk the super-fine line of being good enough to be picked but bad enough to fall to those two, you just needed to be on the other side of the bracket from them and hope your luck held until finals. Even under 2023 rules, that worked out OK at some events.
So did not every event have an automatic wild card? If every event did I’m not seeing a reason to have a wild card vs just expanding the list of auto-qualifying teams. The functional difference I was commenting on was between longer auto-qualifying list and auto-wildcard.
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