[Joe Johnson]

I have not been involved with any team to any extent this year so I am somewhat unbiased. My bias if anything is for a great game.

To be honest, I was worried about this year's game when I first saw it.

To my mind, the success of the entire game hinged on two items:

1) The percentage of the teams that could score effectively in the middle goal (even if unguarded)

2) The real time scoring system keeping up*

As to #2, we are just going to have to trust FIRST. While they are not perfect, they do a pretty good job. I suppose they will get this one right.

As to #1, my view was that if the percentage got down below 33% there would be a lot of matches where one alliance had nobody with a robot that could score in the middle goal against another that could score in the middle goal. To my mind, this is a recipe for a snoozer, the very definition of a lousy game.

My initial estimate was that 25% of teams would be able score in the middle, so I was worried.

Now... ...seeing the robots that folks have posted and the videos, I am thinking that my estimate must be low.

So.... ... I thought we should have a poll. That asks 2 things:

Given 100 randomly selected FIRST robots, Estimate how many will be able to score 5 or more balls in the middle goal in 40 seconds with no robot defending against them?

Has this estimate changed since Week 1?

What do you think? Let us know.

Joe J.



*including penalties so that we don't have a repeat of last year where it just didn't pay to try to figure the score because you had no way of knowing who won without the penalties being factored in.