<<I guess the main question now is this: with no fewer than 33 teams apparently "guaranteed" DivI bids at some point in the selection process, how many teams will end up missing out primarily because of lousy geography?>> I'm not sure I'm following you here as regards 33 "gauranteed" bids and the lousy geography issue. 36 teams are guaranteed DivI bids, with more to follow if any of the original 36 decline. 14 of those will be the winners of DivI overall or undergraduate titles at the 9 SCTs (Arkansas, Berry, Carleton, Case Western, Chicago, Harvard, Kentucky, Michigan, Michigan State, Oregon, Princeton, Texas, and UC-Berkeley A and B). SCT hosts could theoretically have accounted for 9 more spots, but will in fact take something fewer: so far, one host has declined taking a spot in either division, three have taken spots in Div. 2, and the other 5 are still waiting to be heard from, to my knowledge. Assume maybe 4 Div. 1 spots will be taken by hosts. That makes 18. Then the next 14 invitations (or however many it takes to make 32 total) will go to the highest-ranking teams under our formula for SCT performance who did not win either an overall or UG title, regardless of what sectionals they played in. Then spots 33 and 34 are reserved for our commitment to the top teams from the British championships. After which two spots will remain to start looking at those IFT champions. We don't have the statistics yet from all of the sectionals, so it is hazardous to predict too much, but probably several of the schools Samer lists for their IFT high placements will already have qualified by this point, in the 14 (or so) invitations that rounded out the first 32. The "B" teams that he lists won't be included -- I did not make clear in my earlier outline of the process I guess that invitations from this category go only to schools who have not otherwise qualified a team; not to add "B" teams. There are thus six teams that could qualify in "Stage 2": Oklahoma, Florida, Penn State (first), and then Pittsburgh, BGSU, and WUSTL. WUSTL, one presumes from Jason's earlier post, probably wouldn't be accepting an invitation--as hosts of the ICT, they want all their personnel concentrated on that. Of the other five, some (maybe 3? - no guarantees there yet, but that may be a conservative guess) will already have qualified based on their SCT performances. Say that three do; then the other two would get invitations 35 and 36 to finish both all of the Stage 2 teams and the original list of invitees. The waitlist past that would then begin with five more teams from the SCT ranking order, before returning (if we in fact need to go that deep into the waitlist) to IFT 2nd place teams, of which Samer lists four that aren't B teams and don't have automatic qualifications as SCT champions: Illinois, Texas A&M, Florida State, and Caltech. Here again, some of these teams--and possibly even all of them, from glances at SCT results without full statistics--will have qualified already based on SCT performance--by the time we would get this far we would already have issued 41 invitations, which would have included approximately the 33 top teams from SCT play, plus maybe 4 hosts opting for Div. I, 2 British teams, and perhaps 2 other teams invited through Stage 2 because they were IFT champions. By the way, another point I should have included in my overview of the process was that for the Stage 4 invitations we go to overall 2nd-place teams only for IFTs whose field included at least eight Division I teams. (For the overall and UG champions, field size does not matter, so long as it was an NAQT-sanctioned IFT.) I'd have to go back and look up records to see which IFTs if any had a smaller Div. I field than that; I don't have that information with me here. Eric H.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.4.0: Sat 12 Feb 2022 12:30:43 AM EST EST