MAR Competitions

[TylerS]

Originally Posted by Andrew Schreiber

There are a myriad of technical reasons why it can't be done. But the biggest ones are time and money. Regionals are already running late, and as someone who has to help keep the whole show on it's rails, it's HARD. Add into that the camera gear the NFL uses for a game is probably a substantial portion of a regional budget. It's almost a non-starter. [1] Add into that we could avoid this whole issue by acknowledging that our refs are freaking human when planning how many volunteers we need and I don't know why it keeps coming up.

TL;DR - Add scorekeepers/more refs than you think you'll need. It's cheaper and easier.



[1] Oh but what about crowdsourcing! Shaky video from about a million feet away with digital zoom isn't gonna help clarify anything. And, to quote Gregory House, "Everybody lies!"

I think you're making a completely unfair comparison with the NFL. Considering our field is much smaller and at many events the AV crew is already taking in multiple angles. It could be done well and not be prohibitively expensive if it was deemed high enough priority.

I think it's important for FIRST to give events all the tools capable to make consistent and fair calls especially when it's down to deciding the winner of the event. And just throwing more refs and scorekeepers in there is not the solution in my opinion because sometimes it's just too hard to tell from a field-side position what is going on.

But I digress FIRST has other problems and if I had to choose my top 3 things for them to fix this likely would not be one of them.