After 7 hours of deep breaths and reflection on Saturday's events during our drive home last night, I wanted to post a few thoughts after reading everyone's comments.
First, thanks to everyone responsible for the execution of the North Star event for putting on a great weekend. We had a great time.
Thanks also to everyone who stopped to talk to us, look at our machine, offer us congratulations on our performance throughout the weekend.
Congrats to the winning alliance of 2177, 2549 and 3278! Advancing to the Finals and ultimately becoming Champions as the #7 Seed is impressive and highlights both the importance of scouting and strategic alliance selection as well as reminding all of us that 8 alliances participate in the Elimination Round and ANY one of them has the capability of taking home the Blue Banner!
As for my assessment of the Finals round matches:
- The Red Cards issued to the Red Alliance in Match 2 were not something I personally witnessed BUT they very well may have been legitimate. As has been mentioned, there is no way 1 person in live, real-time action can see everything happening on the field and in the Alliance Stations. I'm guessing we'll be able to see (at least) the on-field violation when we review the video footage. The real problem I had with this match was the officials posting a Match Score and THEN "retracting" it to announce the Red Cards and DQs.
- The lack of a G48-C (ALLIANCE ROBOTS may not work together to blockade the FIELD in an attempt to stop the flow of the MATCH.) call in the final match against the Blue Alliance was surprising to me. Having now been on both sides of this specific ruling (or non-ruling) in elimination round play, the match where this call was made against our opposition in the Kansas City Regional semi-finals seemed to be a FAR LESS egregious violation than the events in Match 3 of the Finals yesterday. Again, I understand that 1 person can never see everything that is happening on the field during a match BUT there are a minimum of 3 officials specifically charged with watching the area of the field where this action was happening. In addition, the length of time the action went on made it apparent this was a "strategy" being employed and not just a random instance of 2 Blue Alliance members momentarily defending the Red scoring zone at the same time.
- Finally, the ONLY thing that really bothers me (don't mistake the lengthy recap above for things that bother me because those items are truly just reflections on the event) was the failure of the Officials to recognize Team 2512's minibot score in Match 3. Through 5 weeks of Regional competitions, officials have been manually recognizing minibot scoring time after time (even setting finishing orders in near "photo-finish" matches) but in this particular instance, with the event Championship at stake, no such recognition was made. In a match decided by only 3 points, recognition of this minibot, even if only for the 3rd place finish (2 minibots were officially recognized due to successful target triggering), would have changed the outcome of the match.
Now, Team Driven will get to work rebuilding parts for our significantly damaged machine and we'll show up in St. Louis ready for some more LogoMotion action...hopefully, with and/or against some of our new friends from the North Star Regional!