[pfreivald]

Scouting is even more critical than just making good picks (or avoiding embarrassing mistakes) during alliance selection -- it also helps you get there.

Before each match, your drive teams (or at least drive coaches) should be planning what each robot is expected to do -- that includes both alliance partners and opponents. The more you know about your opponents, the better you can plan how to handle them... and the more you know about your allies, the better you can make your plan.

Especially early in qualifications, teams tend to tell you what their robot was designed to do, not what it actually can do. As games pass and the evidence stacks up, teams tend to be more honest -- though you often get the "but it's fixed now... we think" line (which sometimes turns out and sometimes doesn't). Sometimes you'll be surprised when opponents suddenly come out with a new capability (because something was fixed or upgraded or what-have-you between matches). But understanding what each robot is capable of, and how it manages to accomplish those tasks, is very important to making plans before each and every qualification and elimination game.

So for example, if you know from your scouting data that one of your partners (or your own robot) can't score, and that two of your opponents score only from the fender, it makes perfect sense to send the non-scoring robot to the other side to play defense -- even if they can't stop all the scoring, they can likely slow them down, and this might be enough to give your alliance the edge. If your opponents are strong shooters or incapable of scoring altogether, maybe defense is not the best option and they should spend the entire game doing bridge-related tasks or feeding balls to your good scorers or playing counter-defense instead.