Once again this year, numerous teams missed practice (and actual qualifying) matches. This was a problem last year as well (Check out this thread:
http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/sh...ctice+matches), but I think it was slightly worse this year (practice faired about the same; but at AZ there were a significant amount of more missed qualifiers than in 2006).
I think part of the robots not functioning as designed can be blamed on the little practice time teams have; many don't finish their robot until right before ship (quite common, I know this is typical for us), but in the past two years many have been missing all their practice matches and even a few beginning matches. In this case you have no practice time until your first actual competition match; if you find a problem with your design at that point, the quick match schedule required for FIRST events means you won't get a chance to fix it until Friday night at best, after 3/4 of your qualifiers have been played. Going hand in hand with missing matches, this is the first year I have ever seen teams not passed for inspection when competition started; close calls I've seen, but never actual missed matches due to this.
I think the point that you need to get as much practice with your robot as you can needs to be emphasized a little greater in the future. I did not see any robots that were poorly held together, asking to be broken, I just saw a lot that had a gripper that didn't work quite as well as hoped, or ramps that weren't able to deploy right in all situations. A team cannot expect to semi-finish with the FedEx guy at the door, then use all of the practice matches as time to finish the robot, then use Friday morning as inspection time, and do well at the competition (I've seen it sort of happen once this year... but it's not something you can expect to work).
And why wasn't alot of this been a problem in the past? I don't remember many missed practices in 2005 or 2004 (they happened, but it would just be 3 on 4 matches, not 1 on 0), and I certainly don't remember any missed qualifiers, with the exception of a robot being completely manhandled one match and missing the next one for it. Inspection never seemed to be as big an issue either.