Welcome back, for those unaware I made this thread, in 2012 and followed it up with this thread in 2016, and again in 2019. So much has happened in the 12 years since I posted the first of these threads, Championships were split and remerged, districts went from being the minority of teams to basically equal to regionals, an explosion of teams in Australia, Brazil and especially Türkiye, and of course a global pandemic (most of these just since said pandemic). I decided to revive this thread since we are about to enter a new era of qualification with the Regional Points model and we now are entering the 4th year of a post pandemic FRC world.
Here are the rules for those who haven’t contributed before as well as those who need reminding:
- You must compete with the team fairly regularly
- The team must have competed in 3 straight FRC seasons aka since 2022
- Teams must already be signed up to compete in the 2025 season
- Teams can not have won any official event
- An official event is one that provides a FIRST Blue Banner (Regional, Distict, District Championship, Division, Subdivision, and Championship)
- They can not be your team or teams.
While not a requirement I also would like everyone to provide why they think these teams are good enough to win, and what has kept them from getting the coveted Blue Banner.
Bad Luck? Mechanical Inconsistencies? Scouting Issues?
So from Florida I am going to once again bring up 4065 The Nerds of Prey and 5557 BB-R8ERS.
4065 really decided they were going to increase their competitive level way back in 2019 offseason where they built a whole new robot and would go on to win the Roboticon Offseason. They had a very pretty robot ready to go in 2020 but alas pandemic. There robots since the pandemic have been well made and improved year over year including making smart design tradeoffs when appropriate. Being a consistent alliance captain or first pick who makes it to the 3rd/4th place match they are a team who will benefit from the change to qualification even if they don’t improve. As to why they don’t have a banner yet it honestly comes down to event selection luck and robot readiness. Had they selected other events since the pandemic I think they might have been able to win them, but the more pressing issue is their robot just seems to not be well practiced at their initial event. This year could be their year especially if they get some practice reps in before Tallahassee
5557 is very similar but also different from 4065. They were also not super competitive until offseason 2022 where they made major improvements to their robot and would make finalist at Roboticon. In 2023 they hade a beautiful robot but may have been more than they could handle complexity wise because they never were able to get it to consistently score higher than the hybrid nodes, but they rode said limitation to captaining the finalist alliance at Tallahassee. 2024 was a true breakout year for them and I was very said to see them not make champs, the robot and team more than deserved it and any other year they likely would have made it. 5557 has mechanical and driver prep down, however they need a bit better scouting and programming to get them over the hump to compete with the best in Florida.
Honorable Mentions:
7431 (Best robot in their post pandemic era, needs to get their robot done quicker and practice with it more)
8841 (Improving year over year and finally ditched mecanum which was holding them back)
For anyone looking for a similar thread but about teams who haven’t won an event in a while that thread is here
