<<4) Writing to explicitly prevent an upset is as bogus a proposition as writing to explicitly cause one. In either case, you are playing favorites.>> I've heard this argument often, and I've never been able to put my finger on what I found wrong with it. Now, I think I've found the words. An "upset" as in the team less expected to win pulling out the victory is not bad in and of itself. An "upset" as in the team with less academic knowledge winning is definitely bad. Writing to cause of prevent an upset of the former kind is of course bad, but short of deliberatly putting in hoses so the more aggressive team will hand over tossups, or writing to the sub-subcategories that one team knows cold and scheduling the match for that packet, it can't really happen. However, in the second sense, EVERY packet should be written "to explicitly prevent an upset." Purposely putting in overly difficult questions, including more than a few from someone's pet "canon expansion" project effectively shortens the game. If there are too few tossups, the likelihood of random chance causing the less-knowledgeable team to win increases. Second-century Bulgarian literature isn't considered a waste of time just because it hasn't come up before; it's considered so because no one knows it. In the case of sectionals, I think we have something entirely different at play: the effects of several dozen writers of widely varying quality, a plethora of subcategories and unfinished packets (due to the clock) playing havoc with whatever distribution there is, and a hefty dose of general knowledge and trash. It's no surprise that there should be a 650-point swing between two games with that going on. --M.W. P.S.- No result in a Pitt-Case game can really be considered an "upset" in either sense of the word, since we've gone to the last tossup on two occasions this year, and we've both beaten each other by several hundred in other games. Who the favorite is and who has more knowledge is anyone's guess.
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