ACF fall

• From: matt_reece
• Date: Mon, 05 Nov 2001 18:58:35 -0800
• Message-ID: <000TUEKER.0001PRTLA.12170551-quizbowl_at_...>

I don't really want to get involved in this
debate, but I wanted to point out a few things about the
ACF fall midwest tournament for those who may not be
aware of these facts. First, there were very few grad
students playing. Ed Cohn, a second year grad student, was
on our Chicago team, and did score a lot of points
(~63 PPG, I think), but he is definitely not a
38-year-old dinosaur. The rest of our team was made up of
undergrads: two third-years (Christian and Paul), and myself
(a second-year). The rest of us combined scored ~70
PPG, so you can't claim that Ed singlehandedly
demolished the other teams or determined the outcome of all
of our matches. I won't say that we would have done
as well without Ed; that's clearly untrue. I just
want to point out that this was not a case of a gang
of n-th year grad students ganging up on poor,
innocent undergrads. As far as I could tell, very few of
the other teams at the tournament had any undergrads,
so this is even less true of those teams. The
reading was not as bad as has been suggested; there were
some problems, but those came partly from packets
without pronunciation guides and with typos. Overall I
think that the questions were entirely reasonable in
difficulty for beginning players and the tournament was run
without many problems. I'm not going to say that I'm for
or against the idea of an ACF div II, but it
wouldn't really have been feasible with the small number
of teams present at this tournament. All the players
who competed would have been just as eligible to play
in NAQT, and the questions did not seem to me to be
much more difficult than typical NAQT
questions.

That's all I have to say about this...


An
undergrad who actually likes ACF,

Matt Reece