Let me start off by saying that I am in no way saying the referees made the wrong decisions or anything like that with the choice they made. I just want to make sure that if something like this happens again I will know what the outcome should be. With that being said, at our last competition in the quarterfinals, we were blue. It had been about one minute into the match including autonomous. Our opponents had a cone and were going to score on the stationary goal. One of our mobile goals was in front of the stationary goal and they ran into it causing our mobile goal to go into there mobile goal intake. They backed up and realized that the mobile goal was stuck in their robot. For the remainder of the match, the mobile goal was in their robot. This caused us to not be able to score both the mobile goal or cones on it. At the end of the match, we had fewer points than the red alliance. The referee discussed this and said that they were going to DQ the red alliance for possessing our mobile goal, whether it was unintentional or not. They then talked for a minute more and decided to not DQ their alliance, but instead, they went to the semi-finals. The reason for their decision was because they said that even if we would have gotten the mobile goal and cone we still wouldn't have had enough to beat them. I'm not sure whether this is correct or not because there was a lot we could have done instead of waiting for our mobile goal to start out with and then having to move onto something else.
I just want to know whether a team should be DQ for holding an opposing alliances mobile goal or not.
Thank you so much in advance.
Edit: Here is a video of the specific match I was talking about. match
Holding an opposing alliance’s Mobile Goal is a violation of <SG6>, quoted here for reference:
However, as stated in the rule, whether or not this violation should result in a Disqualification depends on whether or not the violation was Match Affecting (i.e. changed the winner and loser of a Match). While we cannot speak for the referees and what process they used to make their determination, we can see that the final score for this match was 81-46. In order for possession of that Mobile Goal to have had a Match Affecting impact, it would have had to represent at least 36 lost points for the blue alliance.
We would advise referees to use the following types of questions to determine how many points a violation is “worth”:
How many points did the violation directly prevent an alliance from scoring? For example, in the case of a “stolen” Mobile Goal, which Scoring Zone would that Mobile Goal have been Scored in?
Did the violation directly inhibit an alliance from scoring points in another way, such as by preventing access to other portions of the game? For example, placing Cones on their other Mobile Goals, competing for Highest Stacks, Parking, etc.