2010 FLORIDA REGIONAL

[Gabe Salas Jr.]

Originally Posted by Swampdude

a) use these rules to our advantage
b) agree to disagree and protest
c) see if we can come up with our own gentlemens agreement for some compromise that we can all live with
d) FIRST will make a change in the rules - which most people don't think will happen.
e) another idea?

Please don't shoot the messenger! I'm just trying to minimize the confusion and strife. I'm aware there are many strategies a team can employ that don't involve working in advance with the opponents but the fact that there are is why I'm posting this.

Dan - thank you for bringing this up.

Honestly I can go as far to say that the ranking system reminds me of exactly what happened back in 2003. That year in Florida, and along with the other Week 2 regionals, teams recognized that in order to move up in ranking, they had to work together.

That weekend, the UCF Regional set the national high score of 233 (coincidently).

It became apparent to the rest of the teams that in order to catch up, they too had to work together. This set the pace for the rest of the weeks of competition.

I honestly feel that we would be doing ourselves a dis-service by not taking advantage of the rules mainly since we will not be training our teams to be prepared for other regionals and perhaps even the championship event.

Unless FIRST explicitly changes the rules, I say to stick to them. And if the rules change it has to change during Week 2.

With that said, I'm well aware that in some matches it may not be advantageous to do a "6vs0" strategy. That is fine, it is part of the game. It is just difficult for others to accept this type of gameplay because of our upbringing through sports of 2 clear opposing forces and a well defined winner & loser.