Video Review Needs to Happen Now

[Lil' Lavery]

Originally Posted by Ryan Dognaux

It won't be perfect but it will be better than nothing, I can promise you that.

This is where contention is stemming from. The adverse effects may well be worse than not having a system (or investing those same resources* in alternative means of improving calls). The most debated call here is crossings. A fixed angle, full-field shot is pretty terrible at judging whether or not a team completed a crossing successfully. Those angles do a poor job at determining if a wheel (or other component) is still in contact with the outer works, if a team fully stopped touching a sallyport door, or seeing into the many blind spots around the defenses this year.

Moreover, you can't simply making scoring adjustments. When a team spends 30+ seconds of a match making sure they get a crossing that counts, that's all sorts of score impacts beyond the simple points. When a ball isn't registered properly on the tower, that has tons of impact for both alliances regarding capture strategy. Almost any circumstance where video replay is warranted also warrants a replay of a match. Even if you limit challenges to the eliminations, and only 50% of alliances use theirs, that's still 4 extra matches in the schedule. With a 7 minute cycle, at best that's 28 additional minutes added to the schedule (and likely more once you factor in 6 minute field timeouts for teams in consecutive matches).

Team experience is an important factor, but an event running on time is a part of team experience. Anyone who's been in FIRST for more than a few years has witnessed a team being called up for an award, only to find out they already left. One of the most constant complaints regarding CMP and Einstein is how late they run. On the rare occasions that events run ahead of time, you'll find plenty of posts on CD congratulating the volunteer crew for an well executed event.

*For example, one poster here is adamant about adding another key volunteer to this process. What if instead of that volunteer being a replay analyst, they were actually just another ref on the field, helping get the calls right the first time?