[waialua359]

Originally Posted by geeknerd99

In all honesty, the call becomes a moot point, as we lost fair and square anyways. Also, we effectively blocked off access to both of the other team's trackballs. This might have been the rationale for the moot penalty.

However, this call just added insult to injury. It does bring the issue to light though.

But, in match #1, the other robot "appeared" to have broken the 80" rule, but no tape measure came out. Our penalty that we had was caused by having to go backwards to avoid you folks in order to hurdle the ball since we were stuck in the corner.
As we were in situation, I made the call to do it, since the other two choices were to either hit your robot to avoid going backwards or to stop playing and certainly lose the match.
If we didnt have those two penalties, we would have won the match.
But, in all "evenness" we won a couple of matches on penalties also.
My only thing was you folks shouldn't be given a penalty if you cant control the robot being helpless on the ground.
If the rules are that even though your robot is physically capable of breaking the 80" rule, but is allowed to partcipate never crossing it, then it shouldnt work against you, if you have no control. No one in their right mind would purposely flip their robot to fall on the ground.
Referees work hard to make the right calls. My argument is not on the refs, but on the specifics of this particular rule.

You guys were great, despite your hard luck, and we would love to choose you folks again if given the chance in Atlanta. I'm sure you folks will get it fixed in time and do well in April.

See you folks there.