Interesting rule calls from the Detroit District

[Chris Hibner]

Originally Posted by TEE

Thanks for clearing this up for me!

When I asked the head ref, he said that a member of team 51 came to him, and that the clock malfunctioned with 4-8 seconds left, so the information I had was incorrect.

I remember the clock malfunction very vividly in that first match. We finished two logos with close to 30 seconds left in the match and the only way we could lose the match was to not get our minibot deployed, so the drivers stopped scoring with a lot of time left and raced to the pole so no one would try to block us. Our drivers were sitting at the pole with a lot of time left so I was watching the clock waiting for deploy time. Then all of the sudden the clock started displaying: "UUUU", "7777", "LLLL", "8888", and various other 4 digit nonsensical patterns. It looked like a power-up test sequence or something.

I'm not 100% sure what happened with 903, but I was told that they finally launched their minibot when the field announcer started counting the time down, which I think was at 5 seconds or something. So 903 was sitting there not knowing what to do, then they hear "Five! Four! Three! ..." and thought, "I guess we can deploy now" and let it go.

For replay matches, I'm not really sure what happened. I was too busy watching our robot to see make sure it was functioning properly.