Incidentally, for those of you reading, life gets a heck of a lot easier when all you have to do is work with the defense establishment and the international community rather than figure out how best to qualify sixty teams for a major tournament. Anyway. I've always found that the best analogy for quizbowl is golf. Our example here comes from Jackson State, an NCAA men's team that destroyed its competition a few years ago - but still didn't qualify for the nationals because of its poor Strength of Schedule. JSU was restricted in who it could play (you didn't want to lose to a school no one had heard of), and had to play the SWAC championship rather than the SEC one (unlike men's basketball, golf conference winners didn't get automatic berths). JSU was heavily restricted based on who it could schedule, and got hammered as a result. JSU had the rules tilted against them from the start. QB programs are in a similar bind. A program at the University of Houston can't just say "screw this, I'm going to Chicago". In many cases, lack of funds restricts who can go where. Actually, this one's worse - a program can win Penn Bowl and ACF and go undefeated in its region and STILL NOT MAKE THE TOURNAMENT! Even CBI doesn't do that badly. Is Major Major running NAQT's qualification schema? NAQT continually preaches expanding the field. By setting up qualification restrictions that are one-day dependent and fluid (giving that you're competing on the curve), they are setting themselves to alienate constituencies in numerous parts of the country. This would be particularly amusing if a team that everyone thought "came from a poor region" went to Nationals and waxed the floor with people (particularly if the stats were off due to poor moderators or other mitigating factors). Admit you're wrong and give one berth to the winner. I think that, despite losing those two or three additional wild card berths, Michigan B might just barely sneak in.
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