After watching webcasts of competitions the last 2 weekends, I thought that there were a lot of Yellow cards (more than in past years). I don’t know of a way to count Yellow cards from TBA but I could count the DQs. I don’t know why the DQs were called, if anyone can shed some light I’d like to read about it.
Week 1 - There were 1550 qualifying matches and 116 DQs or 7.48% of qualifiers had a DQ. There was 351 Playoff matches and 0 DQs in those matches.
Week 2 - There were 1900 qualifying matches and 180 DQs or 9.47% of qualifiers had a DQ. There was 415 Playoff matches and 3 DQs in those matches.
Some events that caught my eye:
Week 1 #Quals#DQs %
South Florida Regional 79 10 12.66%
CHS District - No Virginia 78 27 34.62%
IN District - Tippecanoe 76 9 11.84%
ISR District - Event #1 59 10 16.95%
PCH District - Gainesville 65 25 38.46%
Week 2 #Quals#DQs %
Central Valley Regional 71 11 15.49%
Dallas Regional 72 8 11.11%
Orlando Regional 84 9 10.71%
San Diego Regional 88 11 12.50%
St. Louis Regional 87 13 14.94%
CHS District - Greater DC 78 17 21.79%
FIM District - Center Line 76 14 18.42%
ISR District Event #2 52 14 26.92%
MAR District - Mount Olive 74 14 18.92%
NC District - Greensboro 62 16 25.81%
ONT District - Ryerson U 78 10 12.82%
PNW District - Wilsonville 80 11 13.75%
Seems to me its simply RED cards in most cases (two Yellow) , I saw a lot of yellow and red in San Diego early and all the way through eliminations, scary to think there were other events with much higher % of DQ (2-3x more wow) . Since Refs don’t track any scoring items in 2017 with automatic scoring, they probably do better at catching fouls/yellows/reds in their areas…IMO
On the airship at least, it’s really easy to get yellow/red cards from simple human player mistakes. We accept the yellow and red card we got in qualifications because it’s clearly in the rules, but for future events, human player actions such as accidentally touching a gear while bringing up the peg should at the most be a technical foul. It’s so easy to do and even if the pilots are aware of it, students make mistakes. Not to mention most teams don’t have an airship at home to practice on and the pegs are always in such terrible shape. For these reasons, I feel this rule should be eased up on a bit.
They already were in an unprecedented late week 1 ease on the Pilot Rules and scores corrected after the first day . I feel that teams just need to read the rules, its certainly possible to not get fouls simply by not triggering them.
I was in a match where a team on my alliance received double yellows for their pilot reaching out of the airship for a gear. It’s VERY easy for an inexperienced pilot who hasn’t fully read the rules to get you Red Carded.
The number of teams that went on to the field when it was purple and not green was really high and happened early/often. This made any mistakes made by a pilot putting their hands outside of the airship a real issue.
Since it is not in my power to change the rule… The experience teams should make a point of educating the less experienced teams on their alliance. With pains taken to do it in a gracious rather than condescending way.
I was a pilot at the Week 1 CHS-Northern Virginia and I believe I can explain the high DQ%. First off, there were teams that did not pass inspection, either until the second day, or not at all, which means all of their matches were DQ. In addition, before the qualification matches, a ‘How to Pilot’ meeting was called for all the pilots and the refs told us that due to the problems with bringing the gears into the airship witnessed during Week 0, we were allowed to reach out of the airship, as long as we did not reach below the floor. After about 15 qualifications, the refs changed the rule back to not being allowed to reach out at all. That caused a lot of confusion and many pilots got yellow cards called on them.
The refs trained pilots on S07 at both events, and demonstrated what was and was not safe. There’s only so much they can do. At the DC event three of the four SF alliances had yellow cards for S07. The one I saw from queue happened when a kid reached for a falling gear in autonomous, and the hand was so far out that the student bent at the elbow to nab the gear.
I agree that many initial violations were for purple lights, and usually it was the HP at the feeder station. For my team I put that student on cart duty, so that student never went on the field and I could manage the drive kids myself. That seemed to work very well.
Its not just inexperience or not knowing the rules, its also human instinct. You drop something, its instinct to try to catch it. This happened to our human player this past weekend. He’s extremely experienced, extremely capable, but he dropped it and due to instinct he tried to grab it and went just a bit to far. Can I train him for this over hours and hours and hours to not reach if he drops? Sure, but thats not realistic or practical.
We took the card cause thats the rules, and the refs did an amazing job reassuring my human player since they know he just made a mistake. That doesn’t change the fact that in the past yellow/red cards were only for huge problems. This year they’re being called for simple mistakes humans make and they have the ability to trash teams.
At Utah we saw a team getting a yellow card for what I like to call “the pilot reach” about every 2 matches during qualifications on Friday. But sometime in the middle of the afternoon Friday all the way through the end of Saturday, this stopped getting called all together. One would think that this means teams were getting the idea and being a lot more careful after all the yellows were issued, but I saw some pretty blatant violations of the rule during this time period that I specified (late Friday-Saturday) in front of referees that were looking for it and they didn’t get called. Consistency is a huge issue.
When looking back on the different yellow cards for the events, I think it was mostly human player error. I know for sure in Tippecanoe that before the opening ceremony, the refs gave a spiel to the drive teams about safety on the field.
And from my scouting data, I know a common reason for getting a yellow card was definitely reaching outside of the airship to grab the gear.
We were one of the DQ’s at Ryerson due to a red card. Our pilot accidentally knocked one of the prepopulated gears off its peg and it tumbled onto the field. While dropping a regular gear is not a violation of H09, taking a prepopulated gear out of place is a violation of H15, whether on purpose or accidentally. I feel the latter should be at most a yellow card, if not just a tech foul, as an accidental knock is clearly not being done for strategic advantage. Even the refs seemed apologetic as they explained that they were forced to follow the rules exactly as written.
Unfortunately that had been one of our better qualification scores and the loss of the match scores and RP turned out to be unrecoverable, knocking us out of any picking positions.
294 and us got yellow carded for our pilots reaching out of the airship to deploy the ropes. After arguing our case with the head referee and him rereading the rules, they were retracted.
At IN St Joe, there was a DQ in Finals 1. This was because of: yellow card for “strategically manipulating two gears to gain an advantage” (my remembrance of the quoting) and a yellow card for a drive team member using a cell phone during the match.
Most yellow cards during quals were for pilot error.
I let out an audible groan when that happened. Our students proceeded to ask what happened. (We had the livestream going during our meeting.) Our drive coach and I proceeded to chat about it. Yea, that’s not a great thing to have happen.
No, but I did see two wins that came out of it. Our pilot felt terrible about it but it was great to see that our team rallied around him and nobody blamed him for the mistake or made him feel worse about it. And it increased his resolve and he was much more careful after that match. We even started to get compliments from other teams about how well he was piloting.
At ISR #2, one team didn’t pass inspection until the second day. 6 of the 14 DQs are from that. The other 8 are mainly from a combination of reaching out of the airship and entering the field early.
The refs in Israel are actually really lax about calling reaching out of the airship; they only call it when the pilot reaches below the deck. I have seen a lot of teams reach out and grab the gear while still outside of the airship and not get called on it. Not complaining (I think that’s how the rule should have been in the first place), just saying that IMO there should have been a lot more DQs.
They were handing yellows and reds out like candy for this in Orlando. Would’ve been more, but us queuers and several referees were actively trying to block. I grabbed about ten team members over two days, and two of them should be thankful the refs took mercy on them and no-called getting stopped with feet on the hinge of the gate ramp.
This and the gear lift yellows made up probably 80-90% of the yellows there; there were a few for possessing two gears and other smaller things. It still astounds me that drive teams are committing all these unforced errors.
