The anonymous flamewad, Mickmars, the Tawana Brawley of quizbowl, writes: <<It is in fact, quite easy to create a packet upon which the top team in each bracket will lose. Just as an excercise, conjure one up yourself. it can be easily done, even if we have no expectations and foreknowledge. In rea tournaments we have some knowledge of teams playing, expectations as to their placement and data on their performance.>> <<1 Penn indicated that it expected Chicago, Michigan, Maryland and Illinois to be the top teams by placing them in separate brackets.>> It takes but one upset by the second best team in the bracket to keep these teams from ending up as a one seed, if that other team wins the rest of its games. There is no guarantee that the pre-seeds will hold up. <<2. Penn could get a sense of what these teams considered a "good" packet by analyzing the packets that each of these teams submitted, and had two months to do so.>> This implies that the teams turned in similar packets, that they turned in packets on time so as to allow reasonable time for such analysis, and that someone bothered do something about it. <<3. Altering format and content need not create a rondomized occurrence.>> SNIP THE LENGTHY FOOTBALL ANALOGY Okay, this is the silliest sports analogy since Nozick's Wilt Chamberlain example. 1) Why is the 4 seed probably the best "Sunny" team? 2) The round robin could not be described as 100% "Winter Weather." 3) Having had access to and having analyzed the round earlier today, the packet, with a couple of minor deviations, fit the distribution as written. There is a lot of wiggle room, even within that distribution. Those deviations were: only two visual arts questions, with the third's place taken by a music question; a third religion question at the expense of philosophy. The literature was slanted towards poetry and drama and away from prose, in addition to the aforementioned children's lit overload. An advertising question was considered business current events. Two religion questions where Christian related. The your choice section was half trashy. Most of these deviations did not come into play, at least in the game I played in. Presumably, these faults were taken care of by shoving the questions to the back of the pack. <<More concretely: Suppose I see that Teams 1-4 prefer less academic and shorter questions, and write about current international events. i simply write long academic questions, increase question length, and focus on domestic business in my CE. Suddenly, these teams are at a disadvantage regardless of their opponents. >> If domestic business is a reasonable part of current events, and if those four teams all write on international events, it is possible that business CE is under-represented, and it is reasonable to make up for it in other rounds.
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