[Aren Siekmeier]

I also was rather surprised and a bit disappointed at the 60.8% in favor of a hard cutoff. As several people have already said, there is already a system in place that gives the FTA discretion to leave the team out if its getting out of hand; having a hard stop gets rid of this discretionary, decision-making element, and seems to me to be, quite frankly, Draconian. It's already true that if the schedule is going to run late because of connections, or if its known that connection isn't possible (because something isn't plugged in), the FTA can agree with the team to drop them from the match. And the 2-3 minutes of intro time is plenty to do this in.

Teams have put in a long (or short?) 6 weeks on these robots, and it would be a shame to cut them out of a match (or 3) because they were 10 seconds away from connecting. If connection to FMS really is a problem, it needs to be tackled from the pits, with more aggressive efforts to inspect early on and get ALL the teams out there for at least one practice match, and getting help to these teams when the issues come up at an event. And don't get me wrong, they do a great job with that already, but the solution is not penalizing the teams with problems, it's helping them.