2014 Lessons Learned: The Negative

[Patrick Flynn]

Originally Posted by Chris is me

In 2009, the long and detailed intros were incredible and inspiring. I LOVED in particular the way the relationships between the teams were discussed and when they had played with and against each other. Ever since, intros have been kept fairly short and only trivial information gets discussed (awards won that year, if that). I know there is a time crunch but those combined 5 total minutes aren't where we should be cutting time down.

This is something that I wish Blair and Andy had done more of during their time behind the desk. Getting some sports style announcers was awesome. But in my mind they were under used, why wasn't 27 interviewed? I mean they just won the biggest award. I think everyone wouldn't have minded 5 more minutes between matches to get some more details and interviews from team members.

Originally Posted by dcarr

The assertions in that linked post are just sad. FIRST really is stuck in the dark ages when it comes to properly exposing data and making it available in a timely manner.

In my opinion, TBA should be adopted as the official online scoring system. It already has an API, so simply getting the right data into TBA accurately and quickly will solve the problem since TBA has the rest of the infrastructure already.

I had a long discussion about this yesterday with someone. And to summarize FIRST is full of nerds. Engineers like their data, I mean I practically live in excel. But publishing more data doesn't help FIRST. Sure it makes more of us numbers people happy, but it costs FIRST time and money and doesn't really serve a major purpose for them.