The most recent posts of Samer and Dave (insert r&b joke here) indicate to me a much bigger problem than whether just Penn Bowl is good or bad. Dave's objections to upsets and to questions on the "CBI" side, and Samer's questioning of whether having any team able to win is good or bad makes me realize we're dealing with two fundamentally different schools here. I think. Correct me if I'm wrong. Dave seems to be of the school that a tournament should determine who *the* best team is. That is, if a tournament were run 100 times on a computer, the same team would win more than, say, 70 of them (>1 SD). Certainly, a team near the top of the pecking order (such as Dave's teams have been throughout his career) would want such a tournament. No one wants to leave thinking they were robbed. Samer, meanwhile, believes that a tournament is run solely for the purpose of entertainment. Whereas in Dave's model, the top teams are catered to, in Samer's the bottom teams are. This leads to a shakeup near the top, and maybe some favorites go home empty-handed, but also it means no one thinks they were left in the dark. Are these schools mutually exclusive within the structure of an event like Penn Bowl? I'd like to think not! Take this year's offering. I'm sure if you simulated it 100 times, 90 or so of them would have been won by Michigan or Princeton. But the other 10? MIT, Penn State, Swarthmore, Pitt... maybe even GW, Duke, or A&M! Both schools of thought have been satisfied: The best team is most likely to win, and a greater number of teams could win. However, the ultimate judge of which school of thought is better doesn't lie with me: it lies with the general public. Having not been at either Kleist or MLK, I will reserve judgment as to how Dave applied his school of thought to those tournaments, but the reactions I have heard from those who were there... Andy
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