[EricH]

Originally Posted by Tristan Lall

Kind of missing the point. The White House thing is a canard; the deadline is the real proposition here.

Exactly.

Many an engineering competition has intermediate deadlines. NASA's Lunabotics has 6 or seven, depending on whether you're an international team or not. Many times, a deadline will have multiple items due. (For example, the one on 4/23 had two required items and one optional item due. A week later, two required items were due.) My senior design class has 7 progress reports, two design reports, and a design fair poster spread over two semesters. Also, taking the FE counts towards your grade--and it's only offered twice a year. SAE's Aero Design only has two--initial registration, and the design report. (Neither count includes the competition itself, FYI.)

See Parkinson's Law. If FIRST gives themselves a timeline of 8 weeks to find and fix the problem, that may be too little. But if they have a deadline that they will report to the entire FRC community what their status is, and preferably have the problem isolated and/or solutions developed, there will be a report at 8 weeks, 9 at the absolute latest.

They can have the entire offseason. But I really think that they should have intermediate deadlines, say once a month, to try to get official information out as to status.