This thread originates from the idea that the Penn team could create packs that would favor certain teams over other teams. Well, yeah, anything's possible. I know a college player/writer who once screwed over his own girlfriend by wording a particular playoff-pack tossup in a particular way. He wrote about The Brothers Karamazov, which she was just starting to read, but ordered the clues in such a way to minimize her advantage there. If you know all the players' tendendencies and are willing to take the effort, question by question, then it tournament can certainly be skewed. However, the manner in which Penn Bowl IX was run almost categorically eliminates this possibility. The meetings were haphazard, especially the game officials' meeting held in the same hallway where Marylanders were already playing cards. The arrangements to keep rooms accessible on Saturday were last-minute at best. Multiple packs were allegedly compiled as late as Friday night, if not Saturday morning. That's not to say that running a tournament by the seat of your pants is _a priori_ wrong. Sometimes thinks will work out about as well as they would have through painfully picayune advance planning anyway -- if you throw things together at the last minute then you save a lot of time for studying, socializing, everything that students need to do. (Don't forget, when commenting about an invitational run entirely by a particular team, that these are students doing this in their free time. Mind you, putting off everything until you have to pull multiple all-nighters is not always the best way to manage this time. =)) So anyway, bottom line is that the suggest conspiracy could *never* have happened because Penn Academic Demolition Team would be way too lazy to pull it off. And I can't blame them (much) for that. Matt
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