As one who finished as the "bitch" of the A bracket with an 0-10 record, I will vouch for the fact that the bottom half of the two brackets were significantly unbalanced. In our case, if you look at the prelim statistics for each bracket, you can see that all our stats (except W-L record) were higher than that of the three lowest ranked teams in the B bracket. However, two of those teams had more wins than us simply by virtue of the fact that had the chance to play similarly matched up teams as opposed to our bracket, which consisted entirely of experienced teams (and we did not get blown out in all of our losses, most notably we had close ones against Emory, Florida State, and Chicago B that would have made our record much better had the last few questions swung our way); a factor that was especially important when the playoffs came about and we essentially got screwed out of the D2 title. Now I agree that a national tournament should be concerned primarily with ranking the top teams, not the bottom ones, and that 99% of ACF players could care less about the whole Division 2 thing, and that Bhan did try to explain me the situation of the bracketting by citing last minutepersonell changes on the teams causing problems. But with only 4 teams in D2 (the other 3 were NOT in our bracket), there is no reason why every D2 team should not get to play each other to determine the championship. Why even bother having a D2 champion if you're not going to determine it through competition? Unless I am assuming this incorrectly, both our team and Arkansas got their only wins against the same teams (both of whom were the other D2 teams), but their wins came in the prelim brackets and came in handy by exempting them from facing us in the bottom playoff bracket (which was in actuality a fluke because Michigan B left early and a team was needed to replace them in the middle bracket). Nonetheless, we should have gotten a chance to play them to determine the D2 champion, and it was especially annoying that we did not since we had several byes in the playoffs and only got to play 2 matches instead of 4. All my bitching aside, I did enjoy the questions and the competition, and I have to accept that our poor finish was due to the fact that the teams we did face played a lot better than we did. Moreover, I am not attacking Arkansas, rather I am expressing my frustration at ACF for deciding to award a Division 2 title and then failing to provide a proper means of determining a champion. I think just the fact that myself and a freshman player, both first time ACF Nationals players, flew down to Atlanta knowing we would play on challenging questions and basically get crushed by the best teams indicates our commitment to the tournament and the game; and I think said commitment was not reciprocated by the way the tournament played out. -Chris Frankel -Princeton College Bowl
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