Oh wow...I never realized that our defensive strategy would get such a reaction... When I started following the thread this morning, it had three posts, and I figured it would blow over...

Now, I think, I should probably say something from our point of view.

You are correct in assuming that we were trying to mimic the idea of the hot bot capping 67 in Ypsilanti. I thought that play was brilliant, and as head of scouting, I was telling our coach all weekend that the way to beat 93 was to do that. My main fear in playing against them was that they would hvae an alliance that triggered in autonomous mode and we wouldn't be able to prevent them from catching all the balls. (Obviously, the point of this wasn't to interfere with their robot...it's just that when you have rollers and want to floor load, it's not good when someone catches half the balls immediately. Great robot design, though )

If you had met our arm driver, you would understand that it was a mistake to get the arm inside their robot. Our team was instantly worried about the repercussions too. I wasn't there during the rounds (as head of scouting, I had to watch Newton), but trust me, Weike would NEVER intentionally shove the arm into the robot. Our coach and I had discussed beforehand if we didn't have the doubler we could lay our arm OVER their robot the prevent the balls from going in. Definitely not inside of the robot.

As for tipping... going into the season we knew our robot was fairly unstable with the arm up... the COG was just too high. Personally, I worried throughout Ypsilanti about the problem, but the robot didn't tip. At Chicago, when it did, we were holding a doubler in a goal, and managed to get back up. At nationals when tipping of our robot became a common occurance, we were almost always able to right ourselves. As for 93 tipping... everyone knows when you build a robot that can tip, that is a risk you are taking. You could fall off of the steps, or happen to get into a pushing war with the wrong robot. In my opinion, they could have taken more precautions against tipping. But at least they managed to get back up, right? And as for flipping onto the goal...I guess I don't have much else to say other than "oops".

As for the referees on Galileo, I respect their decisions. (Although, of course, since it meant we won...I would). However, in Chicago when we were on the opposite side of a referee decision, we also accepted that after reviewing to determine if they were correct. Refereeing is a difficult positition to be in, and to say the least, I watched almost all of the qualifying rounds, and the rulings were consistent.

All in all, I'm sorry to anyone we offended with our defensive meneauvers. We were simply trying to win to the best of our ability with the robot we have. Some mistakes were unintentionally made. So I guess it's nice to see the different perspectives on what happened...hopefully this won't cause any hard feelings to last.

Ellen