California Bottom-Decile Watch List

Membership: a California team that ranked in the bottom 10% by EPA among California teams in at least one of 2023–2026. Teams need not have played all four seasons — rookies and teams that have since stopped both qualify on the years they did play.

Percentile = rank by EPA among every California team that competed that season, the same region-relative measure the competitiveness page uses. Overall = the mean of a team's percentiles across only the seasons it played. Percentiles are always statewide, never recomputed within a filtered half — membership is decided statewide, so a half-relative number would disagree with the list.

Northern vs Southern follows FIRST's California District Details (Rev. Feb 5, 2025), which governs the two 2026 district championships: "The northern border of San Luis Obispo, Kern, and San Bernardino counties is the dividing line… Teams from those three counties, plus Santa Barbara, Ventura, Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, San Diego, and Imperial counties are considered Southern California teams. Teams in the state's other 48 counties are considered Northern California teams." The rule is purely geographic, so teams that skipped 2026 are placed with no guesswork. County is derived from the team's TBA city — TBA publishes no county, and no team here has coordinates.

Honest limits: this is correlation, inherited from the parent analysis. EPA likely reflects program resources — mentors, funding, student pipeline — as much as it drives survival. New teams skew low because they are ranked against veterans, and many teams here appear on the strength of a rookie season alone, which the parent page shows is not destiny. This list marks teams worth a look; it does not diagnose one.