[David Brinza]

Our team witnessed collusion in Phoenix, decided it was not an appropriate "strategy" and would take a stand against it. On Saturday morning, Team 68 had distributed a letter for the participants to sign stating that they would not participate in collusions. There were no such collusions on Saturday in Arizona. When it was time to select alliance partners, we considered only those teams that signed the Team 68 letter.

In the SoCal regional, a red flyer was distributed for teams to post indicating that they would not participate in making arrangements with opponents prior to a match. I didn't see signs of collusion in any of the matches. For those who thought collusion was needed to generate high scores: there was a great match between teams 986/898 and 259/992 where 282 QPs were scored - legitimately!

Responses from FIRST officials have been along the lines of "we're going to let the teams work this out" rather than to legislate ethical behavior. Over the past few weeks, there were hundreds of posts and several polls in CD on the subject of collusion. Based on the matches I saw in LA, I believe the teams have spoken and we should expect to see only purely competitive matches in Houston.