[Dave Flowerday]

I'd guess that since autonomous was introduced in 2003, less than 10% of the teams I've seen used more than 10 seconds worth of the autonomous period. In fact, in many cases the real autonomous action was over in 5 seconds or so. Think of the wall of bins in 2003, or knocking the ball off the tee in 2004, or dropping the hanging tetra in 2005. In the vast majority of matches that I've watched, the last 7-10 seconds of autonomous had nothing going on, and really I felt this took away some of the excitement of the game. Perhaps FIRST has observed the same thing as me and shortened autonomous to a) make the matches more exciting and b) shorten the length of a match in hopes of being able to run more matches.