[Justin Ridley]

The Robonauts would like to thank everyone at the Dallas regional for a great weekend. We're very glad we made our first trip up here and now wonder why it took us so long.

This was obviously a strange tournament and previous comments in this and the 2v3 thread sum up most of what happened. From our side of the field prior to F3: When putting thier robot on the field for the first time, 2613 was slightly across the white landfill line. The field crew required them to leave the field before this could be corrected (their 60 second setup time was up) and would not allow them back on the field to roll back an inch. I only knew they would be disabled because I was close enough to the ref to hear them say it. I can't say if 987 knew they were about to be disabled as well, but I know they would not have been allowed back on the field to fix the problem. Win or lose, we would have rather had all 6 robots playing that last match and it's as simple as that.

We are extremely thankful for how gracious 148/987/3802 acted after what must have been an incredibly heartbreaking ending. These guys reached out to let our students know they shouldn't feel our win was tainted in any way. It was just another example of how much a class act these teams are. Nobody has really mentioned what an incredible accomplishment it is to show up to a week 1 regional and from the very first match have a polished and incredibly effective robot. Both 148 and 987 did this and it's scary to think of how good they'll be in Las Vegas.

Regarding some questions about how 3rd robots were played. On Friday night our team determined the only way to possibly beat a dominate 148/987 alliance was to get all 4 cans from the step along with 2 robots stacking. This meant getting the 3rd robot pulling cans. All day Saturday we worked on a mechanism we could add to a robot in order to do this. 2613 was the perfect robot to utilize this mechanism. We felt this can pulling strategy would really be needed for the finals should we get there, so the beginning of the tournament was spent getting this working, tested on practice field, and the robot fully reinspected. If my memory is correct, they were ready for SF3.

Using this robot added a lot of risks. The can puller deploys in auto, but would never re-raise, leaving a large portion of the field blocked. We thought there was a chance this could hurt our stacking and considered it our hail-mary attempt in a possible 148/987 matchup.

After scoring more points than 148/987 in SF3 we decided to try again without the added risk. Same story after F1. After losing F2 we decided to give it a shot. 2613 was in the loop for all these play/don't play decisions and we're really impressed with how they handled some major robot mods and their willingness to help in any way they could. After all their hard work we wish they would have been able to play that last match, regardless of the outcome. We hope to work with them more in the future.

Finally we've got to give a huge thanks to 624, Cryptonite. We can't sing praises for how this team performed loud enough. They struggled through their qualification matches but we knew the potential was there. We did not realize just how much potential they had. This year is about consistency, and they performed their tasks to near perfection match after match, even playing by themselves in SF2 while we fixed a major robot issue. They won this regional and we got to come along for the ride.