Re: Div 1/Div 2

• From: walter_shandy
• Date: Sat, 20 Oct 2001 11:36:45 -0700
• Message-ID: <000TT3H1T.0015MQJD0.12170551-quizbowl_at_...>

That's awfully "noble" of you, Amber, but the
point of the Div 2 title is to allow players who have
not previously competed at an ICT to compete against
other such players. Any spin you choose to attach to
that is just that... your own spin, not endorsed by or
reflected in the rules of NAQT in any way.

And let's
face it, by your standards, what does the Division 2
title mean? The winning team is the team whose mediocre
players are less mediocre than the other teams' mediocre
players? Or the team who can assemble four mediocre
players who are most complementary in their mediocrity?
And who defines "mediocre", anyway? The only way to
have a fair Division II competition is to have all
those players eligible for Division II compete in
Division II if there is a Division II team for them to
compete on... otherwise Division II is in fact a
meaningless title, fraught with asterisks... its meaning
becomes not "the best players new to ICT", but "the best
players new to ICT who decided to compete in Division
II". The very fact that NAQT allows Division
II-eligible players to compete in Division I when there is a
D2 team from their school they can compete on is, to
me, a mistake... either enforce D2 as a separate
bracket, or have the D2 teams compete against D1 teams.
(The latter proposal is, I think, more intriguing than
it sounds at first... give the D2 title, like the
undergraduate title, to the D2 team which can best perform
against the field at large.) 

But that's just me,
someone who believes in the ultimate spirit of FAIR
competition... or is at least capable of claiming so in the text
of a message.

--Erik Nielsen