Our first ever episode is out, we felt like making an unfiltered podcast about frc every week where we could speak our minds. We swear occasionally and make dumb jokes so if that might offend you this will not be your cup of tea.
DISCLAIMER: Our opinions are our own and do not reflect any past present or future affiliations with teams. This podcast was created for comedic purposes, we do not intend to hurt anyone’s feelings and we respect all teams and the effort they put in. We are exaggerating our opinions for comedic effect, and in fact we often criticize the teams we like the most. With that being said this is a crude podcast where we are going to make fun of every team, event, and region.
If you feel like listening to a couple of idiots talk about robots and try to be funny stop and by and check it out here:
Video should be up now
Also we’ve never done this before, the beginning is rough but it gets better at the end, if you have any topics you would like to see us talk about or suggestions let us know. Feedback would be greatly appreciated
I actually surprisingly liked the “blunt” style (for lack of a better word). I’d say so long as people don’t take stuff too seriously, it’s a nice week-by-week recap.
The main criticism I have is there seems to be a knowledge gap with the hosts. I know you said you watched several matches among many top teams, so it seems you both put plenty of time into this. That is why I found some lines really shocking/surprising:
“Miami Valley Regional…Florida…” (the regional is in Ohio, not Florida)
“We didn’t know anything about 5172” (they have been relevant for several years now IMO, anyone with general worldwide FRC knowledge should know about them
“Not sure how many people know 987 but they’re really popular in the Last Vegas/West region” Likewise, they are pretty well known worldwide
I’m not trying to find points to nitpick, it just seems like the quality of the show could be greatly improved if you brushed up on knowledge of all regions of FRC, especially the ones lesser known nationally. It seems like you guys are great with Texas/US West teams, try to expand your knowledge base even farther.
Thanks, we are from the west coast so naturally we see more of the west coast teams. After the podcast was over we laughed about the 987 point, anyone that would go out of their way to watch a podcast about frc knows who 987 is. Hopefully the process to look at more teams goes:
big data dump -> look at top statistical teams/teams we like -> watch video -> power rank
instead of
look at cool teams -> watch video -> find data dump to finish list and run out of time
we learned a lot from making slides, to scripts about what we wanted to talk about, to refining our ranking process. We watched LA North super closely and definitely didn’t balance the time evenly between all the regions, next week the spread should be alot better, thanks for your feedback!
We don’t want to say stuff like we don’t really care either, it’s being snobbish and conceited. If we didn’t care we wouldn’t spend hours watching match video, we don’t want to be toxic so we’ll try removing comments like that in the future as well.
We’d prefer to remain anonymous at this point, we didn’t feel super comfortable saying names so we just decided that we would stay faceless for now. We’ll probably reveal it in the future though.
Maybe it’s just me, but it does feel a little weird to listen to a podcast where you don’t know who’s speaking. Almost every podcast that I listen to starts off the episode with brief introductions of everyone on the show. The ones that don’t, because they have a consistent, non-rotating cast, at least have that information publicly accessible for new listeners.
Especially for a FRC podcast, which is very much a non-anonymous community, it’s strange to not know who the hosts are, whether they are students or mentors, what team(s) they are or have been involved with, what their experience in FRC is, etc, etc. Context means a lot.
I think this is definitely the type of content that people should be making about FRC to increase its mass appeal, but definitely consider how being anonymous will affect your ability to build a base of listeners.
I got as far as 25 minutes in when the hosts tried arguing against 3538 being a top 10 robot last week.
I like the concept and the hosts (whoever you are) have a good dynamic BUT… I’m not going to listen to an FRC show where the hosts don’t know of 340, 3538, and 5172…
we put 2 of those on our top 10 list, 3538 while good missed more than we liked so they got knocked off, we valued accuracy more that cycle times, its mostly personal preference
I agree a lot of successful podcasts build a following based on the personality and identity of the host but based on the content and tone of the show I could see wanting to remain anonymous. The FIRST community unfortunately has a tendency to want to police perceived violations of GP (see today’s mess of a thread about curse words in reveal videos) and I can see the hosts wanting to avoid that side of the community and any potential backlash to their teams or themselves.
Big concern here is that there are regional idiosyncrasies that can exist in data - NE team scoring for example tends to look lower because they contend with substantially more defense. I’d highly recommend ensuring that you call out certain teams in regions explicitly (ie we’ll discuss the top 3-5 teams in MAR, FIM, West, South East… whatever groupings you think make s sense) to help keep this from turning into another WestCoastBestCoast [edit] spam [edit]
Apparently not allowed to say that… one of these days I’ll figure out where I have to tone things down from work…
