[FRC Blog] Gracious Professionalism and Coopertition

[bduddy]

I'm not saying any team involved did anything wrong or anything like that.
BUT... I'm not entirely sure if I like something like this being put in the FRC blog. Basically, it says that this is something you should do, without providing details as to exactly why. Now, if some robot on the other alliance suffers an unexpected calamity, or breaks because you hit them overly hard in the last match, then I would think that it would be graciously professional to use your timeout for them. But, if their robot just happened to break... well, isn't building a robust and reliable robot part of the game? Should alliances really be expected to give up one of their most important resources to accommodate for their opponents' failure? Maybe it's just me, but I don't think so. We're not expected to handicap ourselves on the field, why does it seem like most expect timeouts to work that way?

I apologize if this post comes off as mean or ungracious or anything like that, but I just think that this becoming essentially expected behavior in all cases is not a good thing.