Our team is beginning a program for scouting this year where we only go to the pits of teams that we have seen perform well during matches. We then get a lot of detail on the top 12 or so, which are all the teams that our field crew looks at. This method saves time, effort, and ear pain of hearing teams talk about things their robot "can" do, and yet has never done on the field.

Most of the data that we use to pick teams comes straight from watching matches, where opinions mean nothing.