Necessity of stats?

• From: cooterchekov
• Date: Fri, 23 Feb 2001 07:46:10 -0800
• Message-ID: <000T9D1E2.000O5H316.12170551-quizbowl_at_...>

Of course, I'll still be doing them for JCV and
Beltway.

But something I'm wondering is, can producing stats
now be considered sufficiently common-practice that
supplying them is a duty, rather than a convenience, of the
tournament's operators?

Of course, this is part of a
deeper and much more argument-inspiring question: what
are the implicit obligations of a tournament's hosts
to its clients? That is to say, are there now de
facto minimum standards to be met by any tournament to
be considered "legitimate?"

As far as I can
tell, only league-affiliated tournaments (NAQT, ACF,
PACE) have set, explicit requirements about numbers of
rounds, productions of stats, and in some cases format;
all three of these stem in one way or another from
the fact of their league affiliation.

On the
other hand, there is a clear "common practice" implicit
standard which, to my nearest guess for college,
includes:
- Guaranteeing everyone at least 10 or (number of
teams)-1 rounds, whichever is less
- Producing and
distributing timely statistics
- Not using
single-elimination anywhere except finals (that's a bare minimum. We
could go on for weeks about "fairness" of
schedules.)

For what it's worth, the above criterion have been
met by every tournament we've been to this year
(except Penn Bowl whose stats we still await), and every
tournament GW has been to in the past four years except Penn
Bowls (again, vanishing stats), Princeton Buzzerfest
'98, and QotC 9. That's only five out of 40
tournaments that we have records on hand for, or an eigth
(not counting tournaments we hosted
ourselves).

Edmund