Ball deflectors.....don't

[pfreivald]

Many of the past eight years we have made a critical mistake of one kind or another, usually in terms of assuming some kind of nominal value wasn't nominal. Thus, we paid a lot of attention to the bridge "help"ing keep the balls from jamming underneath... ...which doesn't mean they won't.

With the 14" extension restriction, they do appear for the most part to make the balls accessible to robots with the appropriate mechanism to knock them out (and/or suck 'em in).

Instead of railing against the unfairness of it all, teams should be considering what they can do between now and their own events (or now and tomorrow's first match) to be able to clear balls from underneath the bridge.

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And on that note, from what I can tell watching Alamo and KC today, lifting the bridge doesn't seem to work more than maybe 50% of the time (or less), so another method might be desirable.