Hey, so you claim you're acting in the interest of creating a stronger field for ICT, and yet you propose to water down the field by having NAQT issue even more autobids to teams who can't put up the stats to qualify. If there's any popular complaint about the ICT bidding process, it's that NAQT already grants too many autobids to teams who win weak regions and end up falling way behind the pack at ICT at the expense of potentially competitive teams who played in harder regions. So it's pretty hard to see what you're trying to accomplish here beyond "let my team in" (which in fact seems to be nothing). As someone who has competed in college tournaments in both Texas and in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic, I can say that (shockingly enough) one region is a lot weaker than the others. You can sit here and try to convince me that your finishing higher than the other one undergrad team in your section makes your team more worthy than CMU, Princeton, UNC, VCU, Williams, Yale, Harvard, Rutgers, Dartmouth, and Columbia, but the stats don't lie. Comparing stats, we can see that had you been in the East region you'd have finished 8th (of 11) in PPG, 9th in powers (second to last), and 6th in bonus conversion. In the Northeast, you'd have finished 9th (of 10) in PPG (second to last), 10th in powers (dead last), and 8th in bonus conversion. Are you seriously trying to come here and insult all of these teams by saying that teams like yours would make the ICT field more competitive than teams like theirs when you barely go .500 and can't even put up decent numbers against substantially weaker competition? Not beating all the open teams in an SCT doesn't make a team bad, but not being able to average even 200 PPG on SCT packets does. The best invitational tournament possible with the best teams is one that doesn't include yours, so I think your avowed interest in seeing that happen is already well-covered by NAQT. If you're so deadset on playing at ICT, you should probably worry more about getting better at quiz bowl than about coming here and wasting our time and NAQT's by not-so-covertly disguising your frustration at not being able to qualify as an earnest effort to improve the quality of the ICT field. It's good that your team made it to ACF Fall, but start going to more tournaments (missed you at UT's Harrison Bergeron Open last spring, for example) and work on reading books, writing questions, studying packets, etc... you'll find it works wonders It's not hard to do, though apparently it takes more effort than making long-winded complaints on the internet. If you can't wait til next year's ICT, might I note that ACF Nationals has no qualifying requirements and always features well-written, challenging questions and a roster of competitive teams? If you're as serious about quiz bowl as you claim to be, then I hope we'll see you there. Cheers, -frankel
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