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Re: Fouls that "Didn't Affect the Outcome of the Match"
There have been multiple, exhaustive threads about what was wrong with the rules and the refereeing/scoring set up this year. And I agree that FIRST needs to do better. Starting with having dedicated scorekeepers and not relying on buggy hardware/software to keep game play flowing (pedestals).
I also read some peoples' posts and analysis that this year fouls and scoring were particularly troublesome in terms of making for a good game. Before becoming a teacher modeling systems using a actuarial and game theoretic approaches was my job. So I wanted to investigate whether the fouls this year were indeed particularly troublesome. And one of the questions you always want to look at is "How often does a penalty affect the end result?" (It doesn't have to be a penalty, it can be any action/situation.) It is not an easy question to answer.
Kevin is completely correct that the fact the match was decided by 60 points and the foul was "only 50 points" does not mean the foul decided the outcome. Of course, the reverse is also true. A 40 point match with a 50 point foul might have turned out the same way without the foul being called. And a match without fouls might have turned out differently if teams were not afraid of getting an "unfair" foul. One approach used to answer the question is to pick some (arbitrary) point, and say "net foul points more than twice margin of victory" and make any matches at least that extreme a 1. Matches with fouls not meeting this threshold are scaled. So we would say a match with one 50 point foul and a 50 point margin would be 0.5 of a "decided" match. It's not perfect but it is a way to make a first approximation stab at an answer.
I have not been able to work my way through more than a few competitions worth of data, but it has been interesting so far. Aerial Assist looks pretty middle of the road to me at first glance. Part of that is the fact that in my FRC tenure (2000, 2003-2014) there have been a lot of years where many "fouls" were actually disqualifications that simply won a match for the other side. In 2004 and 2005 at our regional competitions there were matches in eliminations decided by such calls. In 2005 in particular I remember a controversial call deciding the finals. Even in 2012 there was controversy. I was at Queen City in the semis. Even though I think the referees made the correct call by the letter of the rules (which were later changed I believe) the call was very controversial and decided the outcome.
To be clear, there were a lot of foul points this year. Even once you factor for total scores. I think another factor to consider was that the real time scoring was better than it often is. It was certainly much better than 2013. 2011 is a special case because the tube scoring was good and easy to keep up with, but the glitch-prone minibot towers ended up deciding a bunch of matches. There have been seasons where it seemed like every other match had a substantially changed score due either to fouls or to recounts of the scoring objects. But this year fouls called early certainly caused some teams to alter their choices because you could actually see the adjusted point totals. There is no way to completely avoid having to "redo" scoring after matches sometimes. There is a big difference between FRC and most other team sports: We don't stop the match for fouls. But I still think the real time scoring this year, in spite of easily correctable flaws, was pretty good. The problem was in the rules and in the fact that there was too much for the referees to do.
I will admit, as a cross country and track coach, where the only consequence of of a foul (which can be something as silly as a too large logo on a t-shirt worn under the uniform or forgetting to take off an earring) is a disqualification probably makes me more tolerant of scoring adjustments. Heck in cross country you often have to wait 15-20 (or more) minutes to find out who won a race. In any event I don't know that the "the call didn't affect the outcome of the match" issue was particularly bad this year compared to previous years. And in pretty much every team sport there are going to be calls that are controversial and people upset at being treated unfairly. What I hope for is for FIRST to keep working to minimize such occurrences.
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Thank you Bad Robots for giving me the chance to coach this team.
Rookie All-Star Award: 2003 Buckeye
Engineering Inspiration Award: 2004 Pittsburgh, 2014 Crossroads
Chairman's Award: 2005 Pittsburgh, 2009 Buckeye, 2012 Queen City
Team Spirit Award: 2007 Buckeye, 2015 Queen City
Woodie Flowers Award: 2009 Buckeye
Dean's List Finalists: Phil Aufdencamp (2010), Lindsey Fox (2011), Kyle Torrico (2011), Alix Bernier (2013), Deepthi Thumuluri (2015)
Gracious Professionalism Award: 2013 Buckeye
Innovation in Controls Award: 2015 Pittsburgh
Event Finalists: 2012 CORI, 2016 Buckeye
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