[Akash Shah]

Originally Posted by cad321

This is absolutely true! A perfect example of this (in FIRST) would be at the Pinetree regional. My team was selected by the top rank alliance 3467 and 2648. The matches were going well and we found ourselves in the finals. Match one went great (we won), then match two came along and just before the match started an inspector noticed something that was wrong with our robot that they had missed on the last two inspections causing us to have to sit on the field disabled for the match. Unfortunately this caused us to lose the second match and go into the dreaded third match of the finals. By this time we had fixed our bot and were back up and running. The third match came, we played our hearts out and came out on top for a well deserved title as the regional champions.

So moral of the story? Defense really does help. All 2386 was able to do was defense and score in autonomous. By us not being able to compete match two and losing by over 50 points (we were usually 50 ahead), showed just how valuable our defense was. We were quite pleased with how us not being able to play in match two, showed that we hadn't just won a lottery, but we actually greatly helped our alliance in getting to where it did.

Defense is totally underrated.

Defense is totally underrated. I can see that defense will be a major part of the game after the ball is passed to your alliance member. You will have nothing else to do while you wait for the robots on your alliance to score for the next ball to be put into play. So I can see defense becoming a big part of the game after these week 1 competitions coming up.