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Unread 21-03-2014, 11:49
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Jared Russell Jared Russell is offline
Taking a year (mostly) off
FRC #0254 (The Cheesy Poofs), FRC #0341 (Miss Daisy)
Team Role: Engineer
 
Join Date: Nov 2002
Rookie Year: 2001
Location: San Francisco, CA
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Re: Unscheduled Team Update: 3-20-2014

Quote:
Originally Posted by Swan217 View Post
You're saying you can't play defense without ramming. That is LITERALLY like saying you can't play defense in hockey without leaving your feet, or boarding. Ramming with bumpers is like helmet-to-helmet contact in football - Yes, the helmets protect your head from damage, but only so much. This is like saying you can't play defense in soccer without bodychecking your opponents. It's completely un-gracious & un-professional.
The concern is that we don't have a precise understanding of what "inhibition", "high-speed", "aggressive", and "ramming" mean in an Aerial Assist context.

This isn't just trying to be pedantic. Many people have already witnessed completely contradictory and inconsistent rulings when it comes to physical contact this year. You have teams intentionally flipping other teams without penalty at one regional, and then you have teams getting called for Tech Fouls because an opponent's intake fell off when they hit the field barrier at another. (Even before this update).

And then you have all of the missed assists because refs are too busy entering scores, watching human players, and trying to get the defensive calls right.

Now you have all of the new gray areas being thrown into the mix. Yes, there are cases where "high-speed aggressive ramming" is clear as day. But there are plenty of other big collisions that occur naturally between teams acting in good faith, and you have normal defensive contact that results in damaged robots due to bad luck or poor construction. How will these be called?

The NHL has had rules against boarding for a long time, and there are still controversial calls and tweaks to the rule from time to time (there was a major one in 2011). But tens of thousands of NHL games called by a fairly small group of professional referees have established precedent for how the foul is generally called. We are halfway through the FRC season and have a much larger pool of volunteer referees...
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