900's Championship Cheesecaking Chronicles

[MrJohnston]

Now, my opinions...

* I do not believe the teams did anything against the rules. (Okay, I was wondering whether or not the harpoons would be considered "safe," but figured that was something the inspectors and/or referees could decide.)

* I got the idea that the harpoons may not have been fully ready for competition... The last time I saw them fired (during the Curie finals), they grabbed two bins, but knocked the other two over to the other side.

* I am not a fan of this level of cheese-caking. The harpoons were clearly a device that very few teams were able to construct and, were we to compete against them, we would have felt like we were competing against an alliance of 148-1114-1114. That just does not seem right to me. Moreover, if a team is going to be competing on the championship fields, should it not have to use its own robot?

* Are we really at a point that the key to being asked onto the #1 alliance is to toss the competition bot you've played with all seasons, bring a KoP kit and ask an elite team to cheesecake you? This just strikes me as bad - and quite un-inspirational - especially to teams who were far stronger than 900 this weekend and had to watch the elimination rounds.

* It also begs the question, with all the emphasis and prestige of winning, does 900 now get to claim they reached Einstein? I suppose. It just seems strange to say so as the team finished in 75th place out of 76 teams and didn't enter into a single playoff match.

* I don't really blame the game-design for this. Designing a game that has never before existed or been played is difficult. It is nearly impossible for a group to foresee all the possible ways teams will interpret and/or play the game before it is actually played. It's not like they can look at last year's games and see what this year would be like. No, this is largely a question of culture. What do we as a community consider "acceptable?" How do we define "sportsmanship" and "gracious professionalism"? These are questions FIRST will have to tackle and we'll likely get some sort of rule clarification from it. Of course, none of that will do any good unless the FIRST community can come to some sort of consensus about whether this sort of activity is acceptable.