I had the privilege of participating in a March Madness bracket this past march and with the recent success of the “Make your champs predictions!” thread, I think the concept carries over excellently to FRC. As such, I decided to create April Absurdity, the FRC version of March Madness.

For those unfamiliar, March Madness is based around the NCAA college basketball tournament and participants in a pool attempt to correctly predict how far each team will make it and who will win the tournament. The same holds true for the FRC implementation. Download the PDF, fill it out and turn it in by the deadline (below) and you are entered into the pool. The winner gets bragging rights. Here are the important things to know from the rules in the pdf, if you want to see them before you download:

You may enter either a division or the full bracket. However, to fill out a bracket for Einstein, you must fill one out for all divisions

The deadline is Thursday at 1 PM, before qualification matches start

To submit a bracket, send the filled out .pdf to aprilabsurdity@gmail.com or drop by 639’s pit in Archimedes and hand it in

There is a 15% bonus for submitting it before Looking Forward posts so get going!

I will be entering one myself so I promise not to look at any brackets in the aprilabsurdity gmail until after the deadline at which point they will be posted in this thread

Make sure to put your name (and Chief Delphi name) down on the first page so you can be credited

Points are awarded in the following fashion, per team that makes it to the following point:

+1 pt for correct quarternalist

+3 pts for correct seminalist

+6 pts for correct divisional nalist

+12 pts for correct division winner

+18 pts for correct Einstein nalist

+24 pts for correct World Champion

For some logic on why the points are what they are, they are not quite exponential to encourage making bolder choices early on. However, they are significant enough to highly reward someone who picks correctly in the high tier.

Bonuses are granted for the following:

+1 pt for correctly predicting the number of matches a matchup will go to

+4 pts for correctly predicting where an alliance captain will seed

+10 pts for correctly predicting a full alliance (one time bonus)

+15 pts for correctly predicting a backup bot (+5 pts each for the following: backup bot called, backup bot replacing a certain robot in the alliance, and the identity of the backup bot; each may be obtained separately)

+15% bonus if the bracket is submitted before the annual Looking Forward post(s)

The alliance system slightly complicates things from a standard bracket but to make the system simple, if team 123 makes it to the semifinals, you will get the points for it, regardless of whether they are on the alliance you predicted they would be on. In other words, points are awarded based on the amount of correct semifinalists (or however far in the tournament you are) you have. The only exception to this is the 4 point bonus granted to predicting an alliance captain’s position (ie I predict 456 will be captain of the 7th alliance; they are) correctly, and that is a one time bonus.

I will probably have a couple paper copies available for the taking in 639’s pit (Archimedes) Thursday morning for people who want to fill one out on the spur of the moment but I would highly recommend doing it ahead of time, if only to get the 15% bonus.

Click here to download the .pdf file that you fill out - Right click>Download. I suggest Foxit PDF reader, the fill in boxes show up in bright orange. This will not work if you fill it out in Chrome and then right click>save as. You must download the file first.

Finally, if you are planning to submit a bracket, please post about it in this thread. Since the submission is not through Chief Delphi, I see the potential for this thread to fall to the bottom quickly. So post about if you are going to submit and post when you do.