[Madison]

It seems to me that this practice of entering into agreements about how the game should be played is not indicative of the disruption of gracious professionalism. I don't like that it's something teams have considered, and if I held any weight with my team, it's something I would encourage them to avoid doing, however.

I think it's something much worse than disrespect for the tenets of gracious professionalism that is making this such a hot issue. It's outright laziness that leads to these agreements.

Teams that purport to be supporting the spirit of FIRST by 'cooperating' before a match are desperately clawing for a life raft of dignity. It's been my experience that people with true conviction and belief that they're doing the good, right, just thing don't need to clamor for explanation, yet many, many teams seem are bastardizing the message of FIRST so that it can serve their own interests.

These agreements are nothing more than thinly veiled attempts at overcoming a team's inadequacies. They did not effectively use their build time to develop a consistant, reliable strategy for controlling and maintaining the score throughout a match, and by their failure to do so, they've jeopardized their ability to successfully play the game. By trumpeting the spirit of 'cooperation,' they hope to salvage any chance they may have of winning and they undermine the real effort put forth by other teams to build elegant, well-rounded, effective machines. It's insulting and degrading, and it emasculates the innovative spirit that used to be so pervasive throughout FIRST.

FIRST is about incentive. There's incentive to build a good stacking machine. There's incentive to help other teams have working machines, and there's incentive to develop a strategy that doesn't utterly decimate the opposing alliance. These types of agreements destroy that incentive by making the benefits and disadvantages of the system irrelevant. No longer is there any real reason to develop a clever mechanism or strategy because the lack thereof can be easily overcome by 'cooperating' before a match. It circumvents all efforts to make sure FIRST isn't about winning by bastardizing and perverting the notion of cooperation and using it to make winning paramount. That, above all else, upsets me most.

To see teams trying to augment their inadequacy and supplement their ability by entering into certain truces or agreements rather than effectively use their time to develop innovative, exciting ways of doing so on their own is disheartening. To see teams attempt to manipulate the ideals and spirit of FIRST as justification of their lazy, weak, tired methods is completely disgusting. I think they should all be ashamed of themselves.