Re: Winning versus scoring

anth757 · Sat, 17 Feb 2001 14:33:35 -0800

I thought sleeping it off would made me feel a
little better, but I guess not. 
Charlie
wrote:
"The criteria for bids were announced ahead of time,
and as a result, every team knew roughly how they
needed to perform in order to qualify for Nationals.
"

Actually, the criteria for bids other for the fact a team
needs to win the tournament were not announced ahead of
time. Just see message 3897, no one knew what was the
exact criteria. So I didn't know winning wasn't really
important, just running up the score.

Speaking of
message 3897:
"we try to minimize statistical
advantages to teams who fatten their tossup numbers against
opponents who collectively rate as below the average team
across all teams in their division at sectionals, and
minimize the statistical disadvantage to teams whose
numbers are presumably deflated by facing
better-than-average opponents." 

How would you do that without
looking at individual games? How would you know if a team
had ran up their tossup totals on lower ranked teams?
If you don't look at individual games, then I have
to question how you have an accurate way of doing
what you said above. 

Another
quote:
"essentially, the goal was to make where you play matter as
little as possible to your chances of
qualifying."

That's really fair, so there is a definite advantage
playing in a weaker region because a team can run up the
score. So a team who beat up on two teams who were 2-10
and 0-12 3 times while not winning a game against the
top two teams is "better" than any team who beat
teams with good PPT ratings, albeit by not so large a
score. If you are going to say head to head don't matter
because of random variables or whatever, losing 3 times
to the same team would seem to indicate that the
winning team is better. Or another region where a team
beat scored 1770 against D2 teams in 4 games, but 1730
points in 7 other games, the biggest against a team
whose PPT rating was 7.01 by 245. 
This college
football mentality annoys me a lot, but even college
football doesn't award a team with a lesser record to Bowl
games or national championships. Upsets will happen,
it's part of the game and the teams that survive upset
bids and beat good teams prove that they are better in
my opinion.

Finally:
"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."

I didn't ask for NAQT to change anything, just for
an explanation, which I disagree with. Oh and when
you screw a team, just come out and say it, you
screwed our team with your "fair" system.

I don't
intend to offend any of the other qualifers with my
comments, I am questioning the decision of NAQT and trying
to point out the problems I have with their system.

Again, good luck to all of you that made it to
Nationals. 

Andy
University of Maryland