[Anupam Goli]

Man, I could go to town on what happened at Palmetto

This has to be the worst scouting I've ever seen. EVER. You can't trust the FIRST rankings AT ALL this year. Teams like 4451 got absolutely awful schedules, but were the best assisting bot out on the field, and one of the most consistent low and high goal scorers. They weren't picked at all. I'll be honest, our robot was having a lot of issues, I don't think we (1648) deserved to be picked at all, but team 3571, coached by a certain world championship winning drive coach, and one of the best trussers and best intakes in the field, was also left out of eliminations. We saw teams in elims that had no business being there, there were teams that didn't understand game rules in elims here. Defense may win a lot of matches, but when teams as good as 4451, 3571, and 4452 get overlooked because the FIRST rankings show they were on weak alliances all day, there is a problem. I seriously hope 3571 gets polled in FRC Top 25, that's how good I felt their intake and shots were throughout the day.

I have had enough of week 1 ref issues now. Last year, we lost in quarterfinals because of a ref not calling a pyramid contact, but calling a human player stepping behind the line. I swallowed that one up as having scouting mistakes and having a weaker robot and lucky schedule. This time, I was absolutely livid after watching many matches end in high scores because of unnecessary tech foul calls. When my human player is in no immediate danger of hitting a robot, and barely extends over that yellow tape for a fraction of a second to in bound the ball, I don't think G40 should apply to that. We racked up 150 foul points in a match by ourselves because this ref was too focused on watching millimeter portrustions of hands over the yellow tape*. FIRST, PLEASE FIX THIS! THESE TECH FOULS ARE RIDICULOUS AND I ASSURE YOU AREN'T PREVENTING ANY DANGEROUS SITUATIONS.


I'm glad we don't compete again until week 5, I think it's going to take me a couple of weeks to calm down and refocus on how to improve.

*1024 and 5130, we apologize for incurring so many foul points and making a winnable match into a loss.