--- In quizbowl_at_yahoogroups.com, ater31337 <no_reply_at_y...> wrote: > http://www.dpo.uab.edu/~paik/acf/04nats.html > > Apparently "every team at the most recent installment of ACF's highest > difficulty, national championship tournament had a final PPG of over > 50, with only four teams averaging below 100 PPG (three of which were > D2 novice teams)" translates to "90% of college bowl teams would > average less than 50 PPG on a typical ACF packet." When you start > talking about ACF Fall and ACF Regionals stats, which can be found > through links at http://www.stanford.edu/~csewell/sqbs/ , the numbers > become more apparent. So, are you going to retract your clearly > incorrect and misleading statement in light of the facts? Your facts would be more impressive if they were representative of anywhere near 90% of all quizbowl teams. In reality, most teams don't bother to play ACF anymore, one major reason being that its answers are too obscure for the majority of quizbowl players. It's important to note that he was talking about a hypothetical situation in which every team played on ACF questions. Your facts only talk about teams that actually play ACF, but the ones that do play do not represent a random sample of quizbowl teams; the ones that participate in ACF events are teams that generally do well. The reason that more teams didn't finish with PPG lower than 50, or even 100, is that the teams that would have done so didn't bother to go. In other words, the teams that go to ACF events are the ones that do well at ACF, while teams that aren't good at it just don't go anymore, and the number of the latter far outweighs the number of the former. So, basing your point only on data collected from those who actually bother to play ACF is very similar to the way that Literary Digest predicted that Al Landon would defeat FDR in 1936 by a wide margin (for those who don't know: the magazine received 2,000,000 responses to their poll, but they got the names of people to poll out of phone books and car registries, and the only people who owned those luxuries in 1936 were wealthy and therefore more likely to vote Republican; they were, of course, way off in their prediction, hence the value of random sampling). Mr. Knapp's assertion that 90% of all teams would average less than 50 ppg on an ACF packet may have been hyperbole, but he was probably closer to getting it correct than you are (I'll give you some interesting statistics showing how few people actually play ACF if you want). Incidentally, I have no beef with ACF itself. I think it fills a valuable and necessary place in the college quizbowl world, giving the minority of quizbowl players that enjoy playing on highly challenging, strictly academic questions a place to play; I just find it annoying when people try to pretend that it's something that it's not (namely a format that everyone loves and is really good at). Oh, and to everyone who has bitched about Mr. Knapp posting here: I have had involvement in hosting, directing,writing for, and playing in current/recent quizbowl tournaments; do I have your permission to post to the board? Or is my ppg total too low for my opinions about the fact that ACF-style tournaments have become inaccessible to most players to be taken as anything other than whining?
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