The opinions below are my own - not those of my teammates or of the University. Andy - Well, while I sympathize with your reaction (and personally, if I were the one making the decision, I would probably want to examine the individual game scores), there are problems with all methods of determining qualifiers. For example, there is a clear question of how to determine what a good or bad win/loss is. Many teams have different players from tournament to tournament, so it would be unrealistic to decide ahead of time that some teams are better than others and to use that for the purpose of determining the bids. After all, if we could a priori determine which were the best teams, why run a qualifier, or more to the point, if you're going to decide that certain teams are the best based on season-long statistics, why not base bids on the same criteria? Further, many teams can only be compared to others within their region, making it very difficult to compare between different regions of the country and try to determine the better team. This might suggest trying to determine regional strengths based large tournaments and awarding each sectional a number of bids ahead of time, or perhaps simply awarding bids based on size, but my guess would be that this would not result in the best teams playing at nationals. Nor will any system, quite frankly. Every team has off days an on days. One thing that the stats showed from the Mid-Atlantic regional was that the Princeton B team I was on scored significantly better than teams that we finished significantly behind. Does this mean that Princeton B is a significantly worse team good at running up the score? Or a very good team that lost a lot of close games it should have won? Probably a little of each. Basically, the criteria I would use for determining national qualifiers would be to try to pick the teams that had the best chance of winning the tournament, and I assume that NAQT's formula is their way of trying to do so. If we want to simply compare quality wins or for that matter all of the scores, this would be a much better way to go when ranking within regions but would be, as mentioned before, almost impossible to use between regions. That said, if you want to simply debate out of the Mid-Atlantic teams whether Maryland or Princeton (or G.W., I should add) deserves to be highest on the list, I'd mention the following: On records, Maryland and G.W. were both 9-4, and Princeton B was 6-7. Clear advantage to Maryland and G.W. As for statistics, Princeton was clearly best of the three in both points per tossup and points per bonus, and by enough that errors due to moderators should have had little effect (and our second-largest win was in the slowest room, so I doubt we took advantage of fast moderators enough elsewhere to be clearly ahead in balance - probably all these things balance out over the course of the tournament). Maryland and G.W. were within the margin of error on points per tossup, with Maryland doing significantly better on bonii than G.W. As for quality wins, Princeton B had the only win over winners Princeton A, 400-350. I'm not sure which teams other than Princeton A beat Virginia, though I believe for their two other losses they were down to 2 players because of car troubles. I know that Princeton B lost to G.W. A (by 15), Maryland (by 125), and Pittsburgh(by 10) among others, though I don't have Maryland's results or G.W.'s results in those games. (I'd guess they both about split them to end up with the records they did). Incidentally, in this discussion you should include Penn, which had an 8-5 record and very good statistics if we're only going to include records. I'm not sure which of the top teams they beat. As for bad losses, I again don't have the numbers from the others, but the team with the worst record that we lost to was Rutgers (by 65). [Continued]
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