I'm not going to go through and itemize Ahmed's
comments, but in general, for a tournament that is meant to
be an (inter)national championship tournament,
assuming that it's purpose is to determine who the best
team is, and also to give some sort of ranking to the
rest of the field, ladder play rocks. Would you prefer
PennBowl where one sloppy game in round 1 of the playoffs
can eject you? Well, if you are not the best team in
the country, you just might relish the chance ;-).
But with the ladder play, one, or even two bad games,
ESPECIALLY if you lose to teams that have no right beating
you 80% of the time, will not necessarily ruin your
chances at placing as high as your team's real talent
allows.
The NAQT system, IMO, does by far the best job of any
of the formats' championship tournaments at
determining who the best teams are.
Nothing is
perfect, but this is about as close as I've seen. Though
some people seem to enjoy picking nits (me too,
sometimes), in this case, it might just be the best of all
possible worlds.
- Guy