Prediction: Veterans take off the gloves in Week 3

[Jay Trzaskos]

Originally Posted by wilsonmw04

Over the past two weeks I have seen many, VERY good, scoring bots be neutralized by simple and effective defensive bots. Position is too large an advantage to be countered by a complex scoring device.

I tend to disagree with this statement. Every great offensive robot I have seen, along with many decent scoring robots, are able to place ringers through at least one defensive robot. I have seen offensive teams held to one or two tubes when they are being pressured with two defensive robots, but I have also seen great scoring machines place 5 tubes through one very good defensive machine.

In my mind it all comes down to driver skill more than robot ability. If your driver could successfully maneuver the Rage '02 bot, then your team is golden, give your drive team anything with an arm, and they will manage to get the job done. But if you give a young, untested, driver something like ‘Stang ’07, you may be hard pressed to score 4 tubes.

This is where I see veteran teams having an upper hand. Not only do they have the knowledge of past games to help them train their drivers, but they also have drivers with past experience there to back them up along with new drivers being trained every year that are willing to push themselves to be better than their predecessor.

But back on topic, I agree with every one of Dr. Joe’s predictions. For some reason at UTC I see 173 teaming up with either 177 or 195 and beating the 25 alliance. As for Detroit, I have this gut feeling that Killer Bee’s have what it takes to beat out the 217 alliance. As for 47, they are going to be on one side of that epic battle, I just don’t know which.