Re: Winning versus scoring

ehillema · Sat, 17 Feb 2001 11:06:00 -0800

<<I try this again, could I get an
explanation as to why Princeton B was ranked ahead of
University of Maryland? This the biggest problem I had with
the rankings.>>

Princeton B came out
slightly ahead of Maryland in our invitation order because
that's where the formula we used (unchanged from last
year) put them. This happened because despite the
disparity in wins and losses Princeton B averaged more
points per tossup heard (12.8 to 11.9) playing the same
schedule. This by itself gave Princeton B a higher initial
rating. There is then an adjustment to thet initial
rating based on winning percentage, which favored
Maryland. That adjustment brought the teams much closer
together in our overall formaula--in fact, extremely
close--but in fact left Princeton B a shade
higher.

We have never looked at the results of individual
games. We usually do not know who beat whom, or by how
much, and if we are given that information it doesn't
enter into the formulas--what does is points scored,
tossups heard, bonus conversion, strength of schedule,
and wins and losses which is a weak consideration.
The impetus for such a system was a desire to be able
to compare teams from different tournaments in a
manner that would be fair to all, regardless of whether
they played in a strong or weak sectional --
essentially, the goal was to make where you play matter as
little as possible to your chances of
qualifying.

I will grant you that for a team that was 6-7 to
qualify ahead of a team that was 9-4 in the same field is
an alarmingly anomalous situation. If it should ever
be allowed to happen, it should happen only where
the 6-7 team's stats are emphatically better. The
results this year in the Mid-Atlantic may be a big red
warning sign that we need to alter the weights of the
winning percentage factor to make such a result less
likely in future, or otherwise adjust procedures to
decrease the likelihood that teams more than a game apart
in results *from the same field* can be selected in
reverse order unless the statistical difference is simply
overwhelming.

For this year, however, the bottom line is that we
had a system, we applied it without bias to anyone,
and this is how it came out. We can look at the
results and say "you know, we really need to change
something here for the future." We could not look at the
results the system gave us and say, "you know, we don't
like how this came out this year, so we're going to
change this now retroactively to get a different
result."

Eric H., NAQT ICT invitations coordinator