To reiterate what (few) others have pointed out, it's surprisingly easy to get balls stuck underneath the robot. At one point, we had a bar going across the front of the robot about 4-5" off the ground. Yet, when we drove into a ball in the middle of the field, our robot ended up going over the ball instead of pushing it.
Thankfully, at WPI, the refs kept the spirit of the rule, and seemed to only penalize teams who then tried to score/move the ball.
And to repeat what ahecht said, there weren't many cards issued at WPI either. Our robot was the one tipped/rammed in the red card instance. From my (completely biased) perspective, I think the red card was justly deployed. Of course, I don't know if it was an issue with the other team's robot that unintentionally caused the repeated contact, but it did cause substantial damage to our drive system.
The one thing that really irked me with the red card, though, was that it happened in the 2nd-to-last match on Saturday. So, the team only lost out on 10 seeding points, and ended up in 9th seed (eventually becoming 7th? seed) instead of 6th.
Although this is just enough in our case, I feel that red cards should really represent huge weight. I don't think it will ever be an issue again this year, but in the future, it might be worth it for the GDC to modify the rules to provide *some* sort of carry-over to the elimination rounds.
Take everything I say with a grain of salt, clearly I'm quite biased!
