There are some competitions where I don't see a single lockup and then there are some where we see to many.
As far as the ground wire goes, no. For FRC robots it works but FTC robots not as much. It's actually posted in the forum as something that is not legal.
http://ftcforum.usfirst.org/showthre...ull=1#post7994
There have been multiple threads on the topic but here is the latest one.
http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/sh...hreadid=127587