There are a lot of interesting ideas in this thread, but I am still sticking with
my original "prophecy" (for a lack of a better word).
I seem to have found more evidence to support my reasoning. In
the post that started it all, Dave posts about the infamous Tammy Trimble and includes a picture of a baton. A month later, when pressed for a clue,
Dave replies that "you already have it". Most people (including myself for a while) took the baton hint too literally. IMHO, I believe that this would be too obvious to be a genuine, bona fide clue. So let's look deeper into the baton-myth.
The cheerleader aspect, and hence baton, are not directly referring to a baton as being the actual game piece. However, lets look into where we might find a cheerleader with batons. The obvious answer, is at sporting games. And more precisely, at football games. The baton part was not referring to an actual game piece, but to where batons are used. The reason for this is most people (including myself) would automatically jump to believe the face value clue, and not dig deeper since they were convinced they had already found the real clue.
I can almost guarantee it, but the Montana in the game hint has multiple meanings - alluding to
both the state and the football player. The wording in the game clue is chosen
very carefully, so almost everything will have deeper meaning(s). Try to overlook the "face value" of the hint by thinking about how each word is used, where it is used, or what is the actual process it does, etc.
Then, as I posted before, IFI recently built a
football toting Vex robot. Of everything in the world, why footballs? Where they doing preliminary, perhaps of mechanisms that could be used to pick up footballs? Somehow, I've always felt there was some hidden reason behind the football robot, even weeks ago before the clue was released. And somehow, every time I try to think deeper into each clue, everything keeps coming back to football.
Also, everyone should try to remember this:
In FIRST, every team is equal before the law. (i.e. the start of the match.)
Purposely being biased towards one alliance (i.e. uneven numbers on each side) is something that FIRST will probably never do. By having uneven alliances, you will form a major rift in the FIRST community. A small number of teams will continue to make elaborate and sophisticated robots, while the bulk majority will argue that since there is 2x2x1 or 1x1x1x1x1 alliances, all they'll need is a defensive armored-tank robot to gang up on the offensive robots.
All the defensive teams will gang up on the stronger robots/alliance, and FIRST will turn into destructive BattleBots. The quality of most robots will suffer, and the level of engineering that goes into them will plummet. This is a very thing, that potentially might lead to there actually being negative growth in the number of FIRST teams, since many teams might not want to put six weeks of hard work into an elaborate, well-thought-out machine only to have a defensive 'bot attempt to "destroy" it.
FIRST is about building engineered robots, not about building bully robots. Offensive robots look the problem in the eye, confront it, and beat it. Playing strictly defense skirts the problem, and just tries to bring everyone else down. And how does that famous quote by Dave go?
"Engineers find solutions, while lawyers find loopholes. Which would you rather be known as?"
There have already been hints about Joe Montana's fourth quarter deficit comebacks. Can you say forth quarter multiplier? Like hanging on the bar in 2004, this will be a way for teams to dramatically increase their points by doing a near impossible goal in the last thirty seconds.
Petey has some really good ideas in his post, especially in the last half of his post. Remember, FIRST always looks to find multiple ways to score. There may be pit in the center of the top of the ramp, as well as a goal of some sorts over the pit. Scoring the footballs into the goal over the pit may be worth double the points as scoring in the pit under the goal.
Petey's idea about autonomous mode at the end of the match, where robots try to get onto the green ramp is a really good idea. And I really doubt that there will be 2x2 this year, or any year in the foreseeable. The way the hint is, it implies that five 'bots are trying to accomplish a difficult goal near the end of the match. In order to have five robots, you will need a 3x3 game. The five refers to the fact that only five of the robots will be able to score at the end of the match. One of the robots will "draw the short stick", and won't be able to score.
Finally, I'll end this post by going back to Dave's
Tammy Trimble post. Did anyone else notice that
Trimble is a major GPS navigation company? Will we see GPS navigation in autonomous this year?