[GaryVoshol]

One thing that carries over directly from the sports model - once a team gets behind, they get discouraged and it all keeps going downhill from there. It may be unconscious, but they stop trying, or at least don't try as hard.

As a corollary, sometimes when the situation looks incredibly bleak the team figures there's nothing more to lose anyway, so they take some chances that they wouldn't usually take. Sometimes those chances work out for them, but more often the risky behavior results in the diminished returns that most would expect. An example in this year's game might be deciding to try for one last logo before going for the minibot race. The likely result is to miss hanging the tube and not get the minibot to deploy, but in a few cases they might just pull it off.