[Mrjcowman]

I think many of us need to take a step back and really think about the game, without letting any bias against it get in our way.

FRC is FIRST Robotics Competition, which already sets it apart from your average sport because there is no right or wrong way of doing most anything in the challenge. Robotics is all about thinking outside of the box and looking at issues from a different angle, so why would we only be faced with one kind of challenge?

Recycle Rush is not a contact sport, but neither is a race. Just because there is not inter-alliance combat doesn't mean the game is automatically condemned to not be exciting. Nor does it mean that it won't feel like a sport. It will have more in common with a relay race or an obstacle course, though, because it's about teams working together in a race against the clock.

Even though rounds will not have winners, at the end of the day, teams still advance. Individual games may not record your win/loss, but you need to do as well as you can to rank high in the competition. Honestly, the only difference here is that a loss will not cripple a decent team, because their score is based on all games, not the results of all games.

Then you have the game itself. After spending 6 weeks trying to figure out how you'll attack this challenge, it's safe to say a lot of interesting strategies will appear. Robots will literally come in all shapes and sizes, and you'll see them being assembled rapidly on the field, a more exciting display than just setting the bots out as in past years. Robots will speedily try to stack the totes and the bins, sometimes balancing huge towers and sometimes watching those towers fall. The audience will be on the tip of their seats when the tower next to the flimsy noodle bot wobbles, and screams, shouts, and cheers will fill the room when it zooms out in the nick of time. The strain between opposing alliances in a Noodle Agreement Russian Roulette will be nothing but intense, and as soon as one alliance breaks, noodles will fly, totes will tumble and containers will crash.

Then, atop this all, remember again that this is a Robotics Competition, and this game is having us build robots with much farther reaching consequences than years past. These robots will actually have a use in industry, and that's what FIRST is all about: solidifying the futures for students with interests in science and technology, and providing exposure to those who may develop them.