Re: ACF Nationals -- quick results

bucktowntiger <*jdh22_at_bucktowntiger.yahoo.invalid*> · Tue, 22 Apr 2003 01:08:12 -0000

I was prepared to answer such a message, as I knew one would (and 
rightfully so) come up.

Personally, I was rather discontented with the whole division II 
process.  The tourney announcement said that there would be awards 
for the division II champion and awards for the top two division II 
scorers.  I thought that there would be some kind of division II 
playoff myself, and personally, I would have rather had it that way.  
I would have rather had the opportunity to play Princeton heads-up 
for the D-2 title, and my teammates, in a consensus, felt the same 
way.  Win or lose, at least the title would have been decided by game 
play and not by unbalanced brackets or Michigan B's early departure.  
In truth, even if the preliminary brackets were exactly the same, 
there would have still been a championship game between us had 
Michigan B stayed, as we would have been in the lower tier.  However, 
the championship determination was not screwed up by us, and had the 
roles been reversed, I am certain that you would note the same.  

I agree that your team was screwed out of a chance to take home the 
Div. II title.  However, I am not prepared to concede a theoretical 
match to your team, as though we had a few really bad games early on, 
we lost to Emory A by five points and was tied with Michigan B after 
15 questions.  We drove eleven hours to play in this tournament, and 
we had fun playing against the best teams in America no matter the 
outcome.  The tourney was indeed a learning experience which showed 
us what levels of excellence are possible in quiz bowl and motivating 
us to achieve such excellence.  I also agree that a tourney should be 
first concerned with ordering the top teams, not the bottom teams.  
However, we refuse to take the blame or the ex post facto guilt or 
punishment for a system that was indeed flawed through no fault of 
our own.

As it stands, we were declared division II champions, and we have no 
plans to renounce the title; neither will we stand for any thought of 
outside revocation.

--Joshua Hill
Arkansas Quiz Bowl
Panthera tigris altaica 

--- In quizbowl_at_yahoogroups.com, ater31337 <no_reply_at_y...> wrote:
> 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