[Stu Bloom]

You need to be very careful about the distinction between "how the refs call" and "what the rules are". There is certainly significant room for interpretation in the rules this year, but a referee CANNOT make up his/her own rules, and penalize a team if there is not a rule to back it up. For those who disapproved of the aggressive play this year please make sure you read the rules VERY CAREFULLY before you judge how the matches were called by the refferees.

Additionally, regarding the issue of appropriate or in-appropriate aggressive play in general, several analogies have been made recently in the various threads on this subject. Here's another ... in football, consider a running back heading for the goal line to score a touchdown. The defense is allowed to do almost anything to stop him, with only a few very specific exceptions. One of those is touching/grabbing/pulling on the facemask. This rule uses no judgment of intent, but clearly spells out two different levels of penalty based on the actual occurrence of the violation. If a player gets a leg broken, a concussion, or even worse, there is no penalty called just because the player is "damaged". The penalties are called for rules VIOLATIONS. I am very much in favor of standardized permanent year-to-year rules that would be written this way for our competitions. However a set of rules like this would have to be somewhat experience based, and grow to accommodate specific situations as they arise.

The leaders of FIRST feel, and I agree, that our game needs to be attractive to spectators. The aggressive play on the field gives us that, and without compromising our foundation of Gracious Professionalism, which I feel is brilliantly demonstrated by almost all teams as soon as the match is over, when you are congratulating your opponent and offering to help repair a damaged robot, or other assistance as needed.

If we were to eliminate aggressive play then I am afraid we would remove most of the excitement of these games for the spectators as well as the participants. We could just all go do FLL, or a game more like 2001's (4 vs. 0), but it is my understanding that most teams didn't like that game - which is why we went back to a 2 on 2 competition format.

Well that’s my $.02 (or more like $1.02 – sorry).
Thanks to all the wonderful individuals who help make FIRST what it is. This was a GREAT year – now on to some great post-season tournaments! (see you at IRI July 9-10)

edited to correct prior year's game reference