I was looking at TBA’s matches per year, and I noticed that the only year that this data took a dip (other than this year) was 2005. I also noticed that at a couple of events (I looked at Chesapeake, St. Louis, and Finger Lakes) all the teams had “no matches played”.
Anyone know what happened?
If I’m not mistaken, 2005 was the first year of 3-team alliances. Before then, alliances had 2 teams each.
That’s correct, but I am not sure how that explains–oh. I guess that would explain less matches being played. However, I still don’t know why some events have all the teams labeled as “no matches played”.
There just wasn’t data recorded to TBA for those matches. All this seemless integration between the field and TBA hasn’t always existed, so data from earlier years tends to be a little spotty.
This is the (mostly) correct answer, I believe. Nowadays, the seamless integration starts at the field, gets uploaded to FIRST HQ where it’s made available through FIRST’s APIs. TBA pulls from FIRST’s APIs.
You can click the link on the TBA to view the event details on the FIRST Inspires webpage - this is the link for the 2005 St Louis event: https://www.firstinspires.org/team-event-search/event?id=1302
And on there, you can click a link to the Match Results, which gives you a Page Not Found error: https://frc-events.firstinspires.org/2005/MO/qualifications
It’s interesting to note that there is data on the awards given though: https://frc-events.firstinspires.org/2005/MO/awards
I’m not sure what the process was like in 2005, so the data may just not exist anymore.
This is pretty much the answer. Match data from 2005 and earlier is spotty at best.
Way back in 2005…TBA didn’t exist yet. FRC API didn’t exist yet. Match results were posted to the FIRST website and looked like this: https://web.archive.org/web/20160321041520/http://www2.usfirst.org/2005comp/Events/SJ/matchresults.html
FMS did not have any archive capability. If there wasn’t internet available at the venue, the match results didn’t get posted to the internet and were lost to the void. In some cases internet flaked out at times during the event, so we have partial data but not complete. Awards are possible to upload after, which is why some events have awards (and maybe even qual rankings) but not match results.
Sometimes there are third party records. Pretty much the only events with webcasts were the NASA sponsored events that got the NASA broadcast trailer (your viewing options were NASA TV or RealPlayer!). It was fairly common for teams to make local recordings of the in-house A/V and chop it up later to upload to SOAP 108. #throwback
In 2005, we also saw the only case (that i know of) of a team beating themselves for the win
I think it may actually be the last time a numerical sequence of teams won an event…
How did I forget that…
Any way to accurately back fill this kind of information? Someone must have the old PDFs of event results, right? @Mark_McLeod?
It’s a very labor intensive rabbit hole for the most part. For the alliance history shirt we made there was a point where I was determining team numbers with only ~7 pixels per digit. Not fun*, but completely possible and a lot of people might have some extra free time now…
* some of y’all are kinda weird mmkay
Most of those sort of sheets end up being computer filled and OCR isn’t too terrible if it’s a reasonable format. Tesseract can do a passable job with minimal issues.
Source - I used tesseract a few years back for reading medical triage tags with minimal effort as part of a hackathon.
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