[NotaJoke]

Very insightful post! As always, I am going to reiterate that I believe the competition ends immediately after alliance selection.

Okay, not really. It's just super important! My biggest/most relevant example happened this weekend at Kettering. I may be slightly biased, but I believe that 910 was easily one of the best 5 robots present, yet they somehow managed to the last robot selected, putting them on the winning alliance. Despite the fire power of the first seed/pick (70+862) I think that the eliminations could have gone much differently if another alliance had 910 instead of the first seed.

My hypothesis is that teams assumed 910 would be gone, and thus omitted them from a potential pick list. I made a similar mistake last year (forgetting about a certain Florida team) and that may or may not have been why our alliance didn't do as well as we could have.

So the moral of the story is kind of related to Aaron's post. Know how you want to play, and a pick list to accompany your strategy, but don't forget to add key players to your list, or maybe even have multiple lists, because accidents happen (and can even win you competitions!)