David, Well, you're quite right that we took no cognizance of the effect of D2 teams playing a couple of rounds on the harder question set, with some teams playing on the harder questions twice while others did only once. This was indeed then likely to be a disadvantage to the Dartmouth and Rutgers teams that played on them twice while Yale and MIT played on them only once. Frankly, I hadn't been aware of the issue until reading your message -- since the 14 teams played 13 games each, I had simply assumed that the 15 D2 packets were used for all matches, and did the calculations accordingly. I see now that the tournament used byes, and took 18 rounds (the last being only a single game), so that the last three rounds (or two rounds plus one game) were on the harder questions, with statistic-deflating results. Dartmouth, Rutgers, Yale and MIT wound up close enough statistically that the fact that Yale and MIT played once on the harder rounds while Dartmouth and Rutgers played twice on them may indeed, I'll admit, have had enough of an effect to have been the difference in Yale and MIT getting the nods ahead of Dartmouth and Rutgers. (I will here reveal that the teams that are currently 1st and 2nd on the D2 waitlist are, in fact, Dartmouth and Rutgers, in that order. Another team from the NE SCT, Brandeis--which played on the harder packets only once--is 4th, a position it appears they would have with or without one game on the harder questions.) Had I been aware of this anomaly I might have concluded that in this instance what the "numbers" told me were flawed enough to have overridden them and made our invitation order stick to order of finish for this particular D2 sectional, at least where teams differed in the number of games played on the harder packets. I was unaware of there being any issue with the statistics telling me that despite somewhat better won-loss records for Dartmouth and then Rutgers, the overall stats for Yale and MIT were more impressive. Had I taken that route, it would be the case that Dartmouth and Rutgers would have gotten initial invitations, with Yale and MIT instead being the ones at 1-2 on the waitlist. It's unfortunate that the cutoff between those initially invited and the waitlist occurred right there, too, to underscore the methodological flaw in this instance. Our waitlist history suggests that it will ultimately make no difference for the two teams perhaps unjustly inched lower in the ratings by this, since they are 1-2 on the waitlist, and we have never failed to go at least that deep into the D2 waitlist in past years, and that with only 16 positions to fill. With 24, it would be unprecedented for the top two waitlisted teams not ultimately to get an invitation in fact. I do apologize for having been unaware of the fact that harder D1 questions were used for some D2 rounds in the NE, that teams being compared played unequal numbers of games on those rounds, and that therefore some sort of adjustment might have been called for to avoid penalizing teams such as Dartmouth and Rutgers statistically for their schedule in this respect. (The use of harder questions for a couple of rounds penalizes the entire sectional a little, statistically, vis a vis the sectionals that used nothing but D2 questions -- but the Northeast did rather well in any case, with fully 5 of their 14 D2 teams already invited and holding 3 of the top 4 waitlist positions to boot -- much better than any other sectional.) Thanks for pointing this out to me David; it will, as you ask, at least make us more vigilant for any such anomalies in future. If Rutgers does indeed get an invitation via its high spot on the waitlist, I hope that you will find it possible to accept. Eric Hillemann
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