Talk:2006 ICT

Some of the other weirdness from this year - I don't want to edit this in myself because I'm indirectly involved in most of it. Someone else can decide what's worth mentioning:

• At this time the ICT was still using a Friday night/Saturday day format. They attempted to start the tournament at 6PM in the DC metro area which would have resulted in multiple teams forfeiting games due to being stuck in Beltway traffic. I believe that the final start time for round 1 was moved back by 30-45 minutes or so; maybe someone else has more precise records.

• Prior to the tournament, Robin Richards, in the midst of his multi-year campaign of homophobic harassment against me, issued a challenge about the Georgia-VCU game at ICT. Unfortunately for them we were not in the same prelim bracket and VCU went to the top playoff group while Georgia raised the hackles of many by falling into the third playoff tier as a result of a 145-125 win over the worst team in the tournament and a forfeit win over a no-show USC team, then proceeded to lose all their playoff games in the third group. The question of why so many of the tournament's marginal teams were seeded into one prelim group was raised - usually the grumbling is about the *top* seeds and this was an interesting reversal. This was also the year when SCT was edited to very old-school standards but ICT was head-edited by Andrew Yaphe; VCU went 7-6 at Sectionals and barely qualified for ICT, then ended up easily contending for a trophy spot in the top playoff bracket at ICT. Any seeding based on the SCT results must have been very unreliable.

• USC denied for a long time that their inability to make their flights to this tournament was due to one or more team members being unware of what date the ICT was, before admitting that this was true sometime in 2020.

• My, and my supporters', main issue with the "Arminius" protest was that I was told "names cannot be translated" even though the first clue in the tossup was on the Handel opera Arminio and there is no such rule in the NAQT rules, nor was there ever. It seems incredibly apparent that the native name "Hermann" is correct for a tossup on the person "Arminius" and there's really no way for that protest to be denied other than a default attitude of rejecting all protests. Obviously there's no point to relitigating the whole thing here but the seemingly immediate and baseless dismissal of what should have been an automatic protest regarding an incomplete answer line, and its effect on the final trophy spots, was particularly rankling especially in the context of quizbowl's larger lack of respect for consistent and formalized rules at that time. I think this probably led to my involvement in rewriting the ACF/PACE ruleset a few years later.

• Jimenez Hall, where the tournament was relocated due to double-booked rooms, is Maryland's default tournament location and is very familiar to area teams. The Math/Physics building, where the tournament began, is usually their third choice for hosting (after Armory) and in 50+ Maryland tournaments I've attended I believe only 3 have been held there. The Maryland-hosted 2004 and 2013 PACE NSCs, however, were largely held in Math/Physics. Matt Weiner (talk) 14:48, 25 December 2020 (CST)