Re: some more stats

• From: grapesmoker <no_reply_at_yahoogroups.com>
• Date: Wed, 30 Jun 2004 23:40:32 -0000
• Message-ID: <cbvj1g+beh8_at_...>

--- In quizbowl_at_yahoogroups.com, kevinatil <no_reply_at_y...> wrote:
> I'm not so sure that Technophobia/ACF Fall west is a valid 
> comparison.  The teams which attended ACF Fall at Berkeley (Berkeley, 
> Stanford, and UCLA) were precisely the teams which scored above 200 
> points at Technophobia.  Although there were new players on some of 
> the Berkeley teams, looking at the stats it seems the veterans were 
> more spread out at ACF than Technophobia, raising the scores of the 
> lower teams.

This is true. It's not an ideal comparison. However, at ACF Fall West,
all the teams were in a single bracket, which means that if you're
Stanford Young and Bitter, you have to play two good Berkeley teams
plus your own Old and Bitter team, plus a good UCLA team. It seems
like that would increase rather than decrease score disparity. At
Technophobia, on the other hand, even if everyone takes a loss to the
top one or two teams in the bracket, one would think the other teams
would have higher scoring between them since they are no longer
getting pounded by a much stronger team. But that's not the case: most
teams that didn't end up in the top bracket managed to top 200 points
at most twice, and that was only one team. Some teams did it once,
others not at all. That sounds like it was a little tough for the
teams involved, which you can't really discern from individual scores
because they're dominated by the better players.

I don't say this to bash Technophobia, which was a superb tournament
that I love attending. I'm just bringing up an example of two
tournaments with at least comparable difficulty levels but with widely
divergent attendance level. I suspect that since one of them bears an
ACF label and one doesn't that perceptions play a role. Of course,
there's also the travel factor, but teams were pretty willing to come
to Cardinal Classic at the same location. Speaking of which, Cardinal
Classic has a (deservedly) good reputation as a quality tournament, so
let's take a look at its bottom bracket at
http://quizbowl.stanford.edu/tournaments/ccxiv/playoff_standings.html
. Well, not one team outside the top bracket topped 200 points either.

Obviously there are all sorts of factors that I can't account for
quantitatively. This is just a cursory analysis, but I think it
demonstrates more or less the point, which is that ACF Fall is
perfectly accessible, and I have no doubt that the same teams playing
the same competition on ACF Fall packets rather than on Cardinal
Classic or Technophobia packets would wind up with roughly the same
scores. And yet people attend one and not the other. That to me sounds
like people are shying away from the format based on its reputation
rather than because it's too hard.

Jerry