Arminius scandal

The Arminius scandal was the name given to a potentially faulty protest resolution at 2006 ICT. Though it affected multiple teams the event is primarily associated with its impacts on the VCU team due to posting by Matt Weiner, who also coined its name and commemorated it with the :arminius: emoticon on the forums.

As a result of the protest being denied VCU had to play Chicago A for 3rd place and ended up placing 4th after losing. This was a key event in the anti-NAQT sentiment present at that time and motivated changes to the protest procedure.

Background

During the mid-2000s, standard protest procedure was woefully inadequate. While the rules regarding what situations can be protested have been in place for many years,^{[citation needed]} the advent of codified procedures for how they're resolved is much more recent.

In round 5 of the 2006 ICT, a VCU team of Andrew Alexander, Vinod Kondragunta, and Matt Weiner played against a Stanford team of Kristiaan De Greve, Brian Lindquist, and Eric Smith. At the end of the game Stanford was leading in points, but VCU had lodged a protest which would have swung the result: they had given an answer of "Herman" for a tossup on "Arminius" and been ruled incorrect. Their protest was ultimately rejected, but discussion after the tournament revealed that "Herman" fit many criteria for being acceptable (in particular being a translation of the name "Arminius" in several contexts mentioned in the question) and that the protest had been resolved quickly and without any consultation of outside sources. It also became clear that at least one other player had made the same of "Herman" for "Arminius" and that several other protests had been handled suboptimally as well. In particular, the round 4 game between Michigan and Vanderbilt had both teams make multiple protests before the half which were resolved before the game's conclusion, leaving both teams satisfied that Michigan had won. However, the protest committee met up again later and reversed their decision, flipping the result of the game; this was not communicated to the teams.

Issues with protests were only one of the numerous complaints that teams had about the 2006 ICT. The quality and distribution of NAQT questions remained a major complaint, as computational math remained a possibility and the clock-killing neg remained viable. Though many considered that year's ICT the best thus far, there was pessimism that NAQT would be able to address all these criticisms, especially as they were hardly new - there was doubt that even signing up as a writer would be sufficient to change the direction that questions were going.