2012 NAC

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Re: 2012 NAC

Post by Sen. Estes Kefauver (D-TN) »

I mean, this is a pretty "no duh" kind of question. An old proto-quizbowl existed since the early 80s, there were no good competitors, and then suddenly a little before 2000 there came to be a couple competitors who offered an alternative product that was self evidently more able to reward deep knowledge and hard work, which are two qualities of the game that it doesn't take a lot of effort to understand why they are good, and thus teams who were able to see that and liked that version of quizbowl started to attend it instead.
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Re: 2012 NAC

Post by etchdulac »

Just from my regional perspective:

When I was in high school, NAC was the only option we were aware of (besides Panasonic at Disney World, but that's a completely different animal). Our local TV program was Chip-run; our city hosted his national tournament. Texas began to change when Texaco dropped sponsorship; our last Chip TV tournament was 1994-95. Nationals left Rice after 1994.

Texas people started abandoning Chip nationals (without necessarily anywhere else to go) when they were subject to or otherwise witnessed corrupt decisions. But that was still a small group. In our region, droves started leaving only when other national options existed or became more prevalent. Pyramidal high school questions began to flow in gradually.

If anyone's genuinely interested in what Chip matches looked like long ago, YouTube uploads could be hesitantly arranged. But again, the consensus is correct; little has changed in the 17 intervening years, it seems.
Horned Screamer wrote:there were no good competitors, and then suddenly a little before 2000
Yaphe played Chip nationals at Rice for TJ at least twice, I believe, so I'll go ahead and refute that. It's not like the era was devoid of smart people. It was devoid of smart quizbowl.

Edit: Clarified lower that I was misinterpreting "competitors"
Last edited by etchdulac on Fri Jun 15, 2012 6:38 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: 2012 NAC

Post by Marble-faced Bristle Tyrant »

He means competitors in the economic sense.
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Re: 2012 NAC

Post by etchdulac »

Marble-faced Bristle Tyrant wrote:He means competitors in the economic sense.
My bad. Misinterpreted that, since it was "competitors" in the playing sense who became frustrated with the state of quizbowl, and became those economic "competitors".
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Re: 2012 NAC

Post by AKKOLADE »

something ambiguous wrote:
Scaled Flowerpiercer wrote:
something ambiguous wrote:Out of sheer curiosity, when/why did people start leaving the NAC? Did :chip: questions start getting bad. I guess what I'm trying to ask is why did people go to pyramidal and leave the NAC.
Though I did not experience this transition, I can say from experience of reading Chip packets from every year 1989-2012 that Chip questions did not just "get bad" at some point; they have remained largely the same: any changes are pretty small, and are more like baby steps in the forward direction than baby steps backwards. They "started getting bad" in the sense that there started to be more good tournaments for them to be worse than. The first NSC was in 1998 and the first HSNCT was in 1999, so that would be around the time that pyramidal tournaments caused people to leave NAC; before then teams wouldn't really have anywhere to go (the first NAC was back in 1983), but once better opportunities presented themselves, teams took advantage of them.
Alright, but that made teams think pyramidal was better, or was NAC just so bad that anything was better than :chip:bowl?
Those tournaments (and regular season ones like them) presented teams with a choice.
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Re: 2012 NAC

Post by Stained Diviner »

The amazing part of the story is how slow the transition has been. If Apple decided in 1983 that they were going to keep selling the Apple IIe as their primary product without making significant upgrades, they would have lost their customers pretty quickly when the competition came out with better computers.

Also, there is no simple answer as to why many teams have switched. In a perfect world, it would be because all teams were looking for the most educationally valid competition within practical limitations, but we live in an imperfect and complicated world.
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Re: 2012 NAC

Post by Hannibal »

Just a little something I found amusing -- the writeup of this year's JNAC didn't even mention the fact that Longfellow didn't attend after winning three in a row.
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Re: 2012 NAC

Post by Matt Weiner »

something ambiguous wrote:
Scaled Flowerpiercer wrote:
something ambiguous wrote:Out of sheer curiosity, when/why did people start leaving the NAC? Did :chip: questions start getting bad. I guess what I'm trying to ask is why did people go to pyramidal and leave the NAC.
Though I did not experience this transition, I can say from experience of reading Chip packets from every year 1989-2012 that Chip questions did not just "get bad" at some point; they have remained largely the same: any changes are pretty small, and are more like baby steps in the forward direction than baby steps backwards. They "started getting bad" in the sense that there started to be more good tournaments for them to be worse than. The first NSC was in 1998 and the first HSNCT was in 1999, so that would be around the time that pyramidal tournaments caused people to leave NAC; before then teams wouldn't really have anywhere to go (the first NAC was back in 1983), but once better opportunities presented themselves, teams took advantage of them.
Alright, but that made teams think pyramidal was better, or was NAC just so bad that anything was better than :chip:bowl?
Hey, consider this a little preview of my forthcoming long manifesto on thinking that "pyramidal" is the only necessary component of "good:" I don't think this is an accurate description of why teams stopped playing Chip. NSC questions in 1998 and 1999 weren't so great, nor were NAQT questions in those years. It's debatable to what extent either one fits the modern concept of "pyramidality," at least any more so than a multi-sentence Chip question allegedly does. Teams left Chip because they were getting screwed by the arbitrary if not outright fixed judging at the tournament, by the high cost for a tiny number of games, and by the bizarre dressings of an event that is set up to play to a television camera that isn't there. Even when the other questions weren't better, even when the teams didn't know or care about the difference in quality between different kinds of questions, they chose to stop playing Chip because of the ETHICAL issues involved in doing so. This is one of many points that is lost by a focus on "pyramidality" to the exclusion of all other components of good quizbowl: it's an irrational decision to play Chip *EVEN IF* you don't care about question quality, or *EVEN IF* you genuinely enjoy Chip-style questions, because of overriding fairness/morality issues that are more important than anything specific to quizbowl aesthetics.

The history of Chip defections is really, up until 2002 or so, way more about teams being sick and tired of getting screwed or washing their hands of scumbag behavior, than about question quality issues.
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Re: 2012 NAC

Post by etchdulac »

Matt Weiner wrote:Teams left Chip because they were getting screwed by the arbitrary if not outright fixed judging at the tournament, by the high cost for a tiny number of games, and by the bizarre dressings of an event that is set up to play to a television camera that isn't there. ... they chose to stop playing Chip because of the ETHICAL issues involved in doing so.
Having seen some of this era first-hand, I can attest to this. In part, that is why the departures began slowly; each was related to an event in which only one team was screwed over, and only so many people ever found out about an individual incident. In the era before widespread internet usage, it was easier to keep these things quiet on a national scale.
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Re: 2012 NAC

Post by Sen. Estes Kefauver (D-TN) »

Also, though, it was never like Chip had a monopoly on the quizbowl market. Quizbowl developed semi-spontaneously in lots of different places, with all different formats, mostly devised by people who were old coaches or independent question writers coming up with different ways to ask questions for their tournaments. Chip was the most successful just because he ran a huge national every year and probably had the most reach at one point, but Auk, Questions Galore, Triple Q, Patrick's Press, Question Bank, and god knows what else have been around writing their own bad sets since forever and they had plenty of business. In Missouri for example, Chip basically has never had any influence whatsoever.
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Re: 2012 NAC

Post by jgalea84 »

something ambiguous wrote:Out of sheer curiosity, when/why did people start leaving the NAC? Did :chip: questions start getting bad? I guess what I'm trying to ask is why did people go to pyramidal and leave the NAC?
This is kind of funny to me because basically CC was one of the first to leave NAC for HSNCT and NSC.
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Re: 2012 NAC

Post by Kilroy Was Here »

jgalea84 wrote:
something ambiguous wrote:Out of sheer curiosity, when/why did people start leaving the NAC? Did :chip: questions start getting bad? I guess what I'm trying to ask is why did people go to pyramidal and leave the NAC?
This is kind of funny to me because basically CC was one of the first to leave NAC for HSNCT and NSC.
We're you around when that happened?
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Re: 2012 NAC

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Junior NAC Write-Up wrote:Declaring a National Champion

Flushing defeated Bate in the Chicago Finals, 475-235. Again, Conway Christian Middle School won New Orleans, but had suffered two defeats in the prelims. Ditto Flushing. Hard to believe from their performance on Playoff Monday, but Flushing too had been defeated twice in the prelims – including a loss against Hopkins West. Therefore, Trickum Middle School, Coached by Linda LaPerre and Cary Sell, with an 8-0 record in DC, is crowned 2012 National Champs. Flushing edged Trickum in average points per game, 374-373. It will remain a matter of speculation whether Flushing would beat Trickum, if it were possible to arrange a game between the two. As it is, Trickum is No. 1, but Flushing’s Myles Siglin was named tournament MVP. And he’s only a graduating 7th grader!
Wouldn't it be cool if there existed some sort of national championship tournament where the winner actually defeated their competitors? :roll:

Also, is there any doubt that Kealing (or Longfellow for that matter) would utterly wreck any of these teams?
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Re: 2012 NAC

Post by tintinnabulation »

the return of AHAN wrote:
Junior NAC Write-Up wrote:Declaring a National Champion

Flushing defeated Bate in the Chicago Finals, 475-235. Again, Conway Christian Middle School won New Orleans, but had suffered two defeats in the prelims. Ditto Flushing. Hard to believe from their performance on Playoff Monday, but Flushing too had been defeated twice in the prelims – including a loss against Hopkins West. Therefore, Trickum Middle School, Coached by Linda LaPerre and Cary Sell, with an 8-0 record in DC, is crowned 2012 National Champs. Flushing edged Trickum in average points per game, 374-373. It will remain a matter of speculation whether Flushing would beat Trickum, if it were possible to arrange a game between the two. As it is, Trickum is No. 1, but Flushing’s Myles Siglin was named tournament MVP. And he’s only a graduating 7th grader!
Wouldn't it be cool if there existed some sort of national championship tournament where the winner actually defeated their competitors? :roll:

Also, is there any doubt that Kealing (or Longfellow for that matter) would utterly wreck any of these teams?
Given the tricky tricky tricky questions, I don't think it would be a given for any good teams (including Kealing and Longfellow) to beat these teams.
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Re: 2012 NAC

Post by AKKOLADE »

tintinnabulation wrote:Given the tricky tricky tricky questions
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LC3l5RyAqI4
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Re: 2012 NAC

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the return of AHAN wrote:is there any doubt that Kealing (or Longfellow for that matter) would utterly wreck any of these teams?
I think there is, actually: Trickum played both NAQT regular-season sets in Georgia, and went 18-0 with a victory over Westminster, the 3rd-place finisher at MSNCT.
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Re: 2012 NAC

Post by centralhs »

bt_green_warbler wrote:
the return of AHAN wrote:is there any doubt that Kealing (or Longfellow for that matter) would utterly wreck any of these teams?
I think there is, actually: Trickum played both NAQT regular-season sets in Georgia, and went 18-0 with a victory over Westminster, the 3rd-place finisher at MSNCT.
Trickum Middle School has an excellent team. I wish that they had attended the MSNCT as I think that they would have done quite well there.
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Re: 2012 NAC

Post by tuscumbiaqb »

I'm curious as to why Trickum chose NAC over MSNCT, considering that good quiz bowl is so firmly entrenched in Georgia to the point that the state tournament uses NAQT. Does bad quiz bowl, or Chip specifically, have a significant foothold in the middle school circuit there?
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Re: 2012 NAC

Post by Marble-faced Bristle Tyrant »

It's hard to say if they attended a :chip: regional, since they don't post the tournament fields; just who won. It's possible they got in through Quiznet, or even the Twenty Questions, though I don't see them on the (probably not comprehensive*) Quiznet page. I don't know about Gwinnett (east Atlanta area) schools, but pretty much all the Bibb County (Macon) schools with quizbowl clubs do Quiznet bleeeeggggghhhh.

*edit: I take this back; upon actual inspection it does look like they have all the matches.
Last edited by Marble-faced Bristle Tyrant on Sat Jun 23, 2012 9:51 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: 2012 NAC

Post by centralhs »

tuscumbiaqb wrote:I'm curious as to why Trickum chose NAC over MSNCT, considering that good quiz bowl is so firmly entrenched in Georgia to the point that the state tournament uses NAQT. Does bad quiz bowl, or Chip specifically, have a significant foothold in the middle school circuit there?
I would imagine that it came down primarily to date and/or location. I know from talking to teachers at Trickum that the team was excited about making the trip to Washington. Also, Georgia schools get out extremely early so the MSNCT fell very near the end of the school year; the NAC was during summer vacation for Georgia schools, possibly making it more convenient.
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Re: 2012 NAC

Post by Cheynem »

Apropos of nothing, I'm wondering if something like the Online Skype League could, if it hasn't already, tried to capture the QuizNet audience. Even after we realized how bad Chip was, we did QuizNet for a year when I was in HS because we were ignorant of better online options and thought it was fun to play quizbowl online.
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Re: 2012 NAC

Post by Marble-faced Bristle Tyrant »

Since Quiznet apparently counts toward coaches' stipends (thus teams are encouraged by the board to do it), I've considered sending whoever's in charge of middle and high school quizbowl in Bibb County a kindly-worded letter pointing out the advantages of going to actual good tournaments around the state. However, there's been a lot of crazy :capybara: going on with the new BOE superintendent, so even if I could find out who it is, I don't think I'd be able to get a word in edgewise.
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Re: 2012 NAC

Post by the return of AHAN »

bt_green_warbler wrote:
the return of AHAN wrote:is there any doubt that Kealing (or Longfellow for that matter) would utterly wreck any of these teams?
I think there is, actually: Trickum played both NAQT regular-season sets in Georgia, and went 18-0 with a victory over Westminster, the 3rd-place finisher at MSNCT.
With all due respect, Trickum's reported bonus conversion on MS-02 was pretty pedestrian; not something I'd expect from a team that'd give Kealing or Longfellow a run for their money. But they do deserve some respect for their win over Westminster.

EDIT: OH WAIT, Trickum never had to face Westminster, who lost to Duluth in a single-elimination playoff.... :sad:
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Re: 2012 NAC

Post by Important Bird Area »

There's this as well; I suspect that the listed bonus conversions are likely inaccurate for all teams.
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Re: 2012 NAC

Post by tuscumbiaqb »

Perhaps they modified bonuses so they only have two parts, which I understand is fairly common in Georgia?
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Re: 2012 NAC

Post by Marble-faced Bristle Tyrant »

First half 8/0, second 8/8 (I guess three-part bonuses?).
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Re: 2012 NAC

Post by centralhs »

tuscumbiaqb wrote:Perhaps they modified bonuses so they only have two parts, which I understand is fairly common in Georgia?
I can't speak for the format used at the Jaguar Bowl, but the Georgia Middle School State tournament did use two-part bonuses. I'm not sure if the use of the two part bonus is the norm at middle school tournaments in Georgia but most of the high school tournaments (at least in my experience) use the standard three-part bonus.

Trickum is probably not at the level of either Kealing or Longfellow and they never competed during the year against high school teams. But they are a legitimately strong middle school team, similar in overall ability level to Westminster's middle school team (although lacking the kind of standout player that Westminster had in Nilai Sarda.)
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Re: 2012 NAC

Post by Sen. Estes Kefauver (D-TN) »

Does Trickum have an established team, and most importantly, have they gone to the NAC before?
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Re: 2012 NAC

Post by centralhs »

Horned Screamer wrote:Does Trickum have an established team, and most importantly, have they gone to the NAC before?
Trickum Middle School has had a strong, very active team for years. It is the feeder middle school for Parkview High School which, until the last couple of years, also had a perennially strong, active team.

According to the official write up for the NAC, this is the first year that they have attended that event.
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Re: 2012 NAC

Post by Lightly Seared on the Reality Grill »

the return of AHAN wrote:EDIT: OH WAIT, Trickum never had to face Westminster, who lost to Duluth in a single-elimination playoff.... :sad:
They beat Westminster A and B directly at Jaguar Bowl, though.
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Re: 2012 NAC

Post by Scaled Flowerpiercer »

Oh, I guess I should mention that Irvington was not made "small school champion" because we forgot to explicitly tell Chip that we were a small school when registering. Though he now knows that we are a small school Irvington will not get recognized for the award (despite being the most successful team meeting the description).

Another thing that I just thought I would point out because I haven't seen anyone mention it anywhere else really, Chip's choice of the MVP of each section of the NAC tends is that he picks the person on the winning team who seemed to score the most, there aren't any individual stats of any sort to make a more accurate determination.

Also, this is on the the qunlimited website:
qunlimited.com/trn.html wrote:There are more than a thousand high school academic competitions across the country, and most of them use Questions Unlimited.

We have helped start hundreds of quiz programs, and many others have adopted our format and questions for their official competitions.

In business since 1978, we are America's largest supplier of official tournament questions and answers for academic competition.
It isn't true that most tournaments use Chip questions still, I am pretty sure, right?
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Re: 2012 NAC

Post by Cheynem »

Lies from Questions Unlimited?! Inconceivable!
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Re: 2012 NAC

Post by ryanrosenberg »

Next you'll tell me that UD Jesuit isn't the No. 1 Academic Team in the nation?!?
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Re: 2012 NAC

Post by Scaled Flowerpiercer »

Well, I obviously knew that they had lied before but I thought that most of the lies were at least subjective very large bendings of the truth (like the questions' "Unsurpassed quality and variety" or Detroit Jesuit being the "No. 1 Academic Team in the Nation"), but especially on this page these are just straight up lies.

a little further down the page:
qunlimited.com wrote:Because we keep detailed records on our customers, you can be sure that you won't receive the same questions as another tournament in your area. Of course, you'll receive different questions each time you order.
is also not true, we had a tournament a while back with almost all the same questions as an area tournament the past year.
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Re: 2012 NAC

Post by Marble-faced Bristle Tyrant »

Well, since this thread is still going on, I suppose it's not too late...
Matt Weiner wrote:Every NAC is like time travel to quizbowl in 1985!
Someone please photoshop some :chip: Back to the Future parody images.
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Re: 2012 NAC

Post by Rococo A Go Go »

Marble-faced Bristle Tyrant wrote:Someone please photoshop some :chip: Back to the Future parody images.
I hacked this together but others could probably do much better. I'm also not sure why there's even a listing of Chip Beall as a meme or whatever, but it's likely not for good reasons.

On a more serious note, I did see that a couple teams from our middle school tournament (including the champion) decided to attend JNAC. I find it repulsive to even consider the possibility that our tournament qualified them for JNAC. I'm sure that's not the case, but next year I may go to extra lengths to point out the existence of MSNCT, HSNCT, and NSC to every team that attends our tournaments, and I may even go so far to explicitly point out the flaws of :chip: events.

On that last point I do have one question to throw out there: I can't just tell a team "Hey I heard you did great at NAC, but that means nothing, so go play this other tournament!" I don't want to turn any teams away from pyramidal quizbowl through any perceived insults, so how do others deal with teams who do well at NAC and avoid coming across as dismissing what the team thinks is a great accomplishment?
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Re: 2012 NAC

Post by TulaneKQB »

centralhs wrote: Trickum Middle School has had a strong, very active team for years. It is the feeder middle school for Parkview High School which, until the last couple of years, also had a perennially strong, active team.
Sorry for the late post, but I just read this. I went to Trickum and graduated from/played QB at Parkview; what a shame to hear that they are no longer active. We were never quite at the level of Brookwood or Chattahoochee, but we had a pretty good team for a few years there.
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Re: 2012 NAC

Post by Remember-the-Alamo-Remember-Goliad »

Sulawesi Myzomela wrote:
Marble-faced Bristle Tyrant wrote:Someone please photoshop some :chip: Back to the Future parody images.

On that last point I do have one question to throw out there: I can't just tell a team "Hey I heard you did great at NAC, but that means nothing, so go play this other tournament!" I don't want to turn any teams away from pyramidal quizbowl through any perceived insults, so how do others deal with teams who do well at NAC and avoid coming across as dismissing what the team thinks is a great accomplishment?
In a word, EVOLUTION. The history of my own teams over 20+ years is that their own personal experience(s) of sampling one kind and then another kind of QB made them realize where the greater challenge was. I don't think I ever even made an explicit executive decision as a coach in this area; my students simply evolved toward a system which they perceived as more rigorous, more comprehensive, and more challenging. That combo works for a lot of students and a lot of schools. Clearly for some it doesn't -- and that's OK, too. What is the old adage about leading a horse to water . . . Well, here we are ranked # 5 in pre-season. I never thougtht we'd come this far, but we have -- because the STUDENTS wanted it to happen.
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Re: 2012 NAC

Post by David Riley »

I can second Fr. Gregory's comments; we initially stopped going to a lot of tournaments because my students outgrew them. They wanted more challenges, and fortunately NAQT and PACE were there, as well as local tournaments that began to use better questions than what we had been hearing.
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Re: 2012 NAC

Post by CSQuizJags »

Marble-faced Bristle Tyrant wrote:First half 8/0, second 8/8 (I guess three-part bonuses?).
You are correct, Farrah. We gave them three part bonuses (powers even) and a couple of the "prominent" teams' coaches groused and said that was too much and not "the norm." The local teams, on the other hand, with very little shot at getting to Chicago, loved it. We're not changing that aspect. Heck, may expand to 9/0 and 9/9.
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