There have been many issues brought up concerning the recent ACF Nationals at Georgia Tech and I'd like to take this opportunity to address some of those concerns. First and foremost, I'd like to thank everyone who took the time to send me an e-mail about the things they liked and the things they didn't like. Most of it was very constructive and I am certainly willing to learn from any mistakes I might have made. Please feel free to drop me a line at rsbhan _at_ hotmail.com with any comments you might have. Unfortunately, there are lots of issues that need to be addressed, so I'll try to tackle them one by one. BRACKETING There's really not much for me to say here except for the fact that the bracketing was clearly faulty. I take full responsibility for this and I apologize for any mishaps in the results that may have occurred due to this oversight. I definitely should have had more of a hand in putting it together and I will be sure to do so next time. STATISTICS I have been assured that the full statistics from the tournament will be posted on the GT website shortly. Saurabh and his crew are working on it and I am sure the statistics will be as comprehensive as desired. While I am also a big fan of Chris Sewell's SQBS, I didn't find anything wrong with the stats program that was being used at Georgia Tech during the course of the tournament. It was Tech's prerogative to use their program and I find no fault with them for that. I also take exception to the comments made by Chris Romero regarding the use of SQBS, which is pretty much tantamount to declaring that everyone should wear blue underwear because it is a far superior color. HARVARD-VANDERBILT TIE-BREAKER As Saurabh has already given a succinct explanation of what happened, I won't go any further into this issue other than to reiterate the outcome. After we had decided that head-to-head would serve as the tie-breaker, and after I made it clear to both teams, I was approached by both Harvard and Vanderbilt, who agreed to play a 20-TU shootout to determine the tie. In retrospect, I should have denied this request as it held things up for another ten minutes (and at the time we were already delayed by about one hour). Yet, I ended up letting it happen and Harvard won the shootout. I apologize for letting this happen. It was clearly against the decision we had made. As far as ACF policy goes regarding tie-breaking situations… well, there is no policy. This is probably a bad thing. All I can say at this point is that some definite changes/updates need to be made to the rules for ACF play and I will be sure to look into getting these things done over the course of the summer. I expect things to be much better defined by the time ACF Fall rolls around. PLAYOFF STRUCTURE As Paul Tomlinson noted on this message board, the original playoff schedule for the tournament included only the top two teams from each bracket. As many players/teams noted their displeasure to me during the course of the day, we had the playoff structure changed in mid- tournament to the one that was eventually used. This provided more games for the teams and, it seems, was the preferred option. I would like to thank everyone for being so accommodating during the round-robin/playoff interim while Georgia Tech attempted to get the playoff games set up after things had been altered in media res. I think everyone can agree it was the better option. As Paul Tomlinson also noted, teams should go to a national tournament certainly expecting to play more than ten games and I'm glad we were able to resolve the issue to most everyone's satisfaction. DIVISION II Chris Frankel noted his displeasure at the fact that Arkansas won the D2 title without having to play Princeton. I am in agreement with this. Princeton should have had to play Arkansas at least once to determine the D2 championship and for that I apologize. I can't entirely agree with your assertion that we are all 99% preoccupied with figuring out the ranking of the top teams, though I will admit this second year of D2's existence was the first year that anyone seemed to care. As Ezequiel noted in one of his earlier posts, this will be corrected at next year's ACF Nationals, and hopefully there will be a much larger D2 field contending for the title. Someone else noted that there was no D2 trophy at the tournament: that is correct. We did not have a trophy prepared. Saurabh had sent an e-mail to all the teams requesting conformation of which division teams would be playing in. Apparently, only two teams had responded in a timely fashion (i.e. prior to the ordering of the trophies) so it was decided not to have a championship for anything less than three teams. After the rest of the field replied we realized the error. A trophy is being made for the University of Arkansas and will be sent to them soon. EXEGESIS I don't really have much else to say except that I'm sorry if the tournament did not meet your expectations. It certainly didn't meet mine and I plan on correcting a lot of the mistakes that have been brought to my attention next time around. Thanks again to everyone who gave commentary (both positive and negative) and I hope to see you all at future ACF events. R. Bhan Editor ACF Nationals 2003
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