I'm a bit worried about the part of the new ICT qualification policy that says that the winner of a division with fewer than four teams in it may not necessarily get an automatic invitation. The result may well be that at some sectionals in less well developed regions, where it's hard to get many teams to turn out, NO team will get an invitation, except the host. This would kind of ruin the celebrations of the team that thought it had won a hard-fought victory. R. writes: " Under the previous system, a good, but not great, team with more money could choose to fly to a weak sectional, stomp the local competition, and walk off with the automatic bid. By eliminating that motivation, the principal geographic anomaly is resolved, and the team has no incentive to try to game the system through its choice of sectional. " This motivation is *not* eliminated, since you're still giving an automatic bid to the winning team if there are more than three teams. I'm not even sure that this phenomenon is necessarily a bad thing, because your "good, but not great, team" would be adding to the (likely small) numbers showing up at the "weak" sectional. If there is a concern about mediocre teams flying to weak sectionals, another way to overcome it would be to impose some geographic restrictions on who can play where. I believe that some sort of "affirmative action" to ensure geographic diversity is a good thing. Two years ago, Simon Fraser University sent two teams to their first ever quiz bowl tournament, which was an NAQT SCT (only the second ever held in the Pacific Northwest), and one of those teams ended up winning the Division II title. Since there were only three Division II teams, and their stats weren't all that great, I'm convinced that if the 2003 rules were in place, SFU wouldn't have qualified for the ICT. But winning the opportunity to play in St. Louis provided great encouragement in making SFU the most active team in the region.
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