[ToddF]

There seem to be two questions being debated.
1) Was the foul called correctly? I'll pass on that question.
2) Is 50 points an excessive penalty for this penalty? No, it's not. Every year very smart people analyze the game looking for strategies of play that provide a net benefit. There are CD threads created where people debate whether the benefit of intentionally committing a foul outweigh the cost of the penalty points. If a ball has three assists on it, and a robot attempts a high goal score with that ball, it is potentially worth 40 points. If a human player throws a 2nd ball that interferes with the first, and prevents those 40 points from being scored, that's a benefit of 40 points. To dissuade this behavior, the associated penalty MUST be greater. Otherwise, the cost/benefit analysis shows that it is actually beneficial to throw balls at certain high goal shots to prevent them from being scored. Yes, there is a whole question of whether this behavior is GP. But, it has been persuasively argued by Chairman's award winning teams (the ones we are supposed to look up to) that game play other than what the game committee intended (scoring into opposite alliance's goals, for example) is smart rather than non-GP.

Add in the fact that referees are overworked and miss penalty calls all the time, and you have teams which may decide that committing this sort of foul is worth it EVEN IF the penalty is 50 points. It was against the rules in logomotion for human players to throw tubes to prevent robots from hanging. But there were teams that did it. Teams calculated that for certain situations, the risk of getting called for the foul was low enough and the benefit in points denied vs the cost in penalty points made committing the foul a beneficial strategy. Note that people in this thread are arguing that an action has to be performed TWICE before it becomes a "strategy". The flip side implication is that the first foul is "free". To discourage this type of game play, penalty point values MUST be high enough so it's just not worth it.