[Warren Boudreau]

Sandrag,

Teams missing matches has always and probably will remain an issue. After all, as long as you are at the competition you might as well try to win.

Even if a team would field their robot just to take up space on the field and field a human player to help out with ball handling, it would be a help. A couple of years ago, we had a match with a team that wasn't planning on fielding their robot. I begged/coerced them into just placing the robot on the field. It's presence was enough for us to win the match.

I guess what I'm saying is that you need to convince those teams that are not planning on fielding a robot for a match to contribute whatever they can to the match. Be it a dead robot or live human player.

The only fair way to replace missing robots, would be for FIRST to build and drive a surrogate robot for teams missing a match. Of course, the team would get no points. Even that idea has it's drawbacks.