CBI Region 11 Comments

theblasmo · Mon, 19 Feb 2001 09:36:14 -0800

First off, congratulations to all the teams that
qualified for CBI Nationals this weekend, and I look
forward to seeing you in LA. Cynthia Jennings ran a
fantastic tournament this weekend, dealing with complaints
and the "circle of death" in what I believe was the
fairest way possible. All moderators were extremely
competent, and the volunteers were great, putting up with
our team's eccentricities, including the placement of
greenery around our match table during the Nebraska game.
And thanks to Nebraska for putting up with it. They
won the Sportsperson award for the tournament, and it
was well deserved. The only real drawback to the
tournament itself consisted of a lack of coffee on Day One,
and that was made up for on Day Two. My negative
comments are few, but hopefully constructive.
1. CBI
Rules should definitively state the tiebreaking
procedures for a tie between more than one team. Cynthia
solved it by taking total points, avg. pts. per game,
and winning and losing margins among the three teams
and allowing the team that was first for most of them
-- us, fortunately -- to sit out while the other two
teams had a one game tiebreaking match. I think that
worked well in our situation, but if there had been
three different leaders in the three categories, then
it would have been very problematic. We were
prepared to solve this via Jell-O wrestling. Personally, I
think taking the winning and losing margins added
together would work best. In other words, you take the
points team A lost by while playing Team B, and then
take the amount of points team A won by over Team C.
For us it was -35 (loss to Wash U.) plus +65 (win
over MU-Columbia), so we had an overall margin of 30.
The problem, of course, is what happens if one of the
losses is not from the other, tied teams? I guess total
points would probably work the best under those
circumstances. By the way, that margin should give you an idea
of how close the matches were between these three
teams. 
2. Allow the faculty representative to be a
half-time employee if that representative is a graduate
student. Many academic teams don't even have a faculty
sponsor who travels with the team, and for the ones that
do, that person is usually a full-time instructor
that can't take the necessary time off. In our case,
our original sponsor couldn't make it, so we managed
to draft a colleague of mine from the English
Department who just happened to be giving his students time
off that Friday. He's full-time, but in a pinch, we
might have been in trouble.
3. Make the wording in
the rulebook regarding protests more specific than it
is. If a protest needs to be resolved immediately
after the half the problem occurs, then the rules need
to absolutely say so, as NAQT and ACF and Trash
does. The CBI rules aren't as clear about that. I have
no problem with the way our protest was resolved --
even though our answer was correct, we should have
lodged it after the first half -- but without more
specific detials, some problems might occur.
In any
case, it was a great, competitive tournament, and since
it's my last year to play CBI, I feel really good
about getting to represent the region for another year.
Good luck to everyone.
David Murphy,
University
of Oklahoma