Last call for bold predictions before competition begins!

[Joe G.]

The top 25 teams in FRC (measured however you would like -- FRCTop25, Looking Forward top 25, whatever) will have a greater percentage of low bar challenged robots than FRC as a whole.

In the elimination rounds, over 50% of low bar capable robots will never use the low bar.

Captures will occur in fewer than 30% of qualification matches across all weeks of regionals/districts. Of these captures, more than half will be achieved entirely through low goal scoring.

Matches in which all three robots make a high goal auto shot will occur, on average, less than three times per regional. Multi-ball autos don't count, but these will also be rarer than many are expecting, much rarer than they were in 2014

An 8th seed will make Einstien, and make a deep run there.

So will a rookie, and not as a 4th team.

No robots with Rhino tread modules will make Einstien.

A record number of backup robots will be used, both at championships and at regionals/districts

A highly favored alliance will loose in the finals due to a roboRIO brownout related error.

Scaling will start the season rare, but become practically a necessity for einstein teams.

Related, a cheesecakeable scaling device will emerge later in the season.

Across all week 0.5 and week 1 events, the number of triple tortugas will approach double digits.

A robot will successfully, if roughly, perform a barrel roll crossing the ramparts. People will be talking about it for years.

A majority of robot redesigns this year are going to be focused on swapping from a variable position to a fixed position shooter. The number of batter shooters will increase dramatically as the season goes on.

The category C defenses will never be used past the divisional quarterfinals.

Somebody is going to do something stupid with plastic pneumatic tanks, resulting in a hard impact to them during a defense crossing, catastrophic failure of the tank, and will subsequently re-open debate about these things.

For the first time since an equivalent statement was added in 2012, FIRST will act on the blue box under section 3.1.4 of the game manual, re-scaling the tower strength for championships. People will be disgruntled by this.

People will like this game less in April than they do right now. Reasons cited will be similar to Aerial Assist: robot fatigue, scoring/penalty inconsistencies, in addition to a less severe repeat of 2010's tendency to cause robots designed for the tunnel to blur together when viewed from a distance.