Depression-driven Tractor Pulls

[Mike Soukup]

I have never put much faith in flyers that tout a robot's abilities. It's not that I think teams lie, but they just like to accentuate the positives and ignore the negatives. If a team wants to prove that they will be an asset to an alliance, they shouldn't hand out flyers, they shouldn't suck up to the people in the pits, they should prove their abilities on the playing field and make sure the scouts from other teams see them perform.

FYI, most of the scouts & strategy people for each team aren't in the pits, they're in the stands watching matches. If you tell a member of the pits how well your robot performs, they most likely will not forward it to the proper people.

Your best shot at getting picked is to perform well in the qualification matches. This doesn't necessarily mean winning matches. It may involve showing off a particular ability or strength of the robot, something you can do better than anyone else in the division. High seeded teams aren't always good elimination bots and low seeded teams are sometimes the best picks for the eliminations.

Teams who are out to prove a point are the reason I fear matches on Saturday morning. Powerful goal grabbing teams who aren't in the top 15 have nothing to gain by getting high QP, but have everything to gain by showing how strong they are. That's why I was worried about our latch match. I knew we were in for a touch match against 7 & 9. You proved your power but unfortunately the picking teams either weren't paying attention or found a weakness in your bot.

As rees2001 said, you should also talk to the real scouts for teams and tell them to watch your upcoming matches. Talking to them at 11:45 on Saturday doesn't help much because they have most likely settled on their top picks already.

Since I always try to be honest with people, I'll tell you why we didn't pick you. I'm the anonymous source Matt mentioned in his post. We knew that if we wanted to beat 308 (and 71 if we won the division) we needed a fast bot that wasn't afraid to slam into the center goal and disrupt them. 7 was too slow for that role so we chose the goal bot we thought had the best combination of speed (no more than 3.5 secs to the goal) and power / anchor ability. Of course 180 was first on our list, but unfortunately they weren't overlooked this time like they were at KSC.

Mike