[gblake]

Originally Posted by pfreivald

And yet, excellence should come through ***striving for*** a blue banner.

I don't care if my team wins. I care if they try their hardest to win.

What you wrote in the message I quoted is a fine and worthy sentiment; but if you want to agree with Chris, then I sincerely suggest agreeing without slipping the Blue Banner back into the equation. If you disagree with him then certainly feel free to unambiguously say so.

If I may put some words in his mouth, his point is that there are so many off-the-field goals that a team can (and should) pursue, that using on-the-field performance as the "600 pound gorilla" metric for assessing an FRC team's success is something that should not occur automatically or otherwise become a habit. The blue banner is only one of many targets a team can shoot for.

On the field performance is interesting and exciting, and some teams choose to make it the foundation they derive many other good things from; but while it is a useful way too decide if a team's robot is excellent, it is not the right way to decide if a team is "excellent" (whatever that might mean).

I can imagine many hypothetical teams that would be excellent in many important senses of the word that are also pertinent in FIRST; but who would not build an excellent robot. I recommend devloping a habit of explicitly not using blue banner counts to evaluate teams.

Blake