[Josh Murphy]

I personally Think that this rule is stupid because the flags are required by FIRST not the teams. If it was not for FIRST these flags would not be on the robot to begin with, therefore not having to worry about this problem. I also understand this rule, that some of you might not be realizing why it might be here. I think that some teams may have built their robot to get tubes of of their flag pole ("the innocent way of herding") and all of a sudden be able to get this tube off when it pays off the most. If there is a row of 7 and they allow a robot to pick up tubes that has a tube on the flag pole and they are scoring them then they already have # 8 on them, and all of a sudden they are able to get it off and score a 256 when they could have gotten it off to begin with. Now if I am blue and red throws a tube on me I should be able to score blue tubes even if red gets the penalty. This rule is just like teams going into the wrong zone at the wrong time geting the 30 pt penalty(if they are there the whole time) because they have nothing to lose if they have 0 and you have 0 they are just stopping you from beating them, I think that the 30 pt penalty should be added to the opposing alliances score because this rule sucks and it is not right for teams to do this just because