Quote:
Originally Posted by Racer26
Knowing the way the B&T system is constructed, I'm amazed that nobody else thinks this happens on a regular basis.
IMO HQ should require us to submit a digital photograph of the robot in its bag, with the numbered tag visible within 24 hours of bag day. Then its much harder to abuse the system.
As it is now, there is absolutely nothing (except y'know, morals) to stop a team from working on their robot right up until their competition, and bag the robot the night before, having a mentor sign the paper saying it was in on bag day.
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If a team was willing to cheat and lie to get extra time to work on their robot, what makes you think they wouldn't be willing to do a little work in Photoshop?
Having teams submit a photo would add a surprisingly difficult step to getting robots unbagged - FIRST would have to set up a system to gather the photos on bag day, gather the photos after each event for those doing multiple events, manage to find a way to strictly enforce district teams that have unbag periods between events, send all of those pictures on to the LRI's at the events so they could go through them all, along with the forms and the actual tags on the bags to ensure each team was compliant.
That would be a massive, complicated undertaking that would still result in holes that could allow teams to cheat and lie to get extra time on their robot.
FIRST isn't like other sports. That's evident just walking through the pits and seeing teams helping each other. I'm willing to trust a vast majority of the teams to follow the rules in good faith.
If you come across a team (and have evidence) that is not following the bag and tag rules, pass that along to FIRST before the regional - after the regional is over, there isn't much we can do. Please don't wait until the regional starts to bring it up to the LRI... that will cause huge issues at the event that can more easily be dealt with beforehand (if we know about it before the event, we can go in with a decision from FIRST. If it's that serious of a violation and we learn about it at the event, it takes up time from the LRI, head ref, FTA, and possibly a call in to HQ to figure out what to do, when all of these people have other stuff they need to be doing to ensure your event is successful).
When it comes to Bag and Tag issues... a vast majority of them are minor issues. The only major issue I had was at MN State Champs last year, and we got that figured out pretty quickly for everyone involved.