At the Southfield District Event (MI) there were a few cases where the delay between an alliance clearing the field of balls and the pedestal being lit to allow the inbounder to grab the next ball.
I'm wondering if this was observed at other events, and how it was handled.
In one of our matches we had a 40 sec delay, and, because the delay wasn't explicitly observed during the match, it took a number of visits with the referees before we were granted a replay of the match.
Here is the video of the match:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vv-QUKZLWUQ
At 1:00 (video time) you see the last red auto-ball cleared from the field. At 1:45, you see the human player return with our first cycle ball. For about 40 seconds, the pedestal was not lit. You cannot see the pedestal in the video, however the problem is quite obvious.
While I'm generally against 'video reviews' of penalties and such during a match, I'm wondering if an exception should be allowed for cases such as this; where clear video evidence of a field/match fault exists that can be correlated with events observed on the field (supposedly, the ref marked the field as cleared shortly after the last ball was scored, but some delay caused the pedestal to not light).
I saw that in some cases even small delays often had a big impact on match flow, (where a robot sits and waits for a new ball as the old ball is cleared, but gives up after some delay to go defend, then ends up being late for the inbounder). I would expect these smaller delays will diminish over time as the refs get more experienced with the game; but there are some interesting situations introduced by the 'human' factor in the game.