@oldman1941 I did so badly at this last year. A good third of the athletes I picked each weekend ended up being on a Team, not individual, or had already announced that they were injured and withdrawn. Let's hope I can avoid that this year
@oldman1941 I wrote a quick predictive model to choose for me... We'll see how it does. It made some controversial choices (e.g. had Vellner at 3rd) that I am curious to see if it pans out.
Next week the model should be better since it will include the results from this first week.
@jonjones229 Very true. My intuition would have been to place him second after Fraser, obviously.
The model even shows Chase Smith with an almost identical score as Vellner (just slightly less). You could think of it as my model scoring him at 3.4th place if that were possible.
I think Vellner takes an "unfair" hit in my model because of his injury last year during regionals... He probably could have scored better than he did if it were not for his injury. But, I think the main reason Vellner is not solidly in 2nd is due to his Open performance (mainly 17.3).