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Arkansas Quizbowl: The Irony, The Irony

Posted: Sat Apr 24, 2004 9:29 pm
by moncal
Does anybody else think that it is ironic that Ft. Smith Northside who got eliminated after regionals, and then got added to the state tournament by the quizbowl board, has just won overall state with a prize of 10,000$? :evil:

Posted: Sat Apr 24, 2004 10:14 pm
by Matt Weiner
Care to elaborate?

Posted: Sat Apr 24, 2004 11:49 pm
by moncal
At one of the regional sites one team that is normaly horrible beat almost every team there by very impressive margins. They were answering most questions in places that the questions could not possibly be answered. Needless to say they won. The next week when the AGQBA Board met they decided that this team did cheat but there really wasn't enough evidence to warrant disciplanary action. They did however decide to fix the problem. They decided that they would expand the 5 and 4 A state tournaments to 4 teams from every site. Northside was either 3rd or 4th at their site and did not earn the right to go to state. However at state they played pretty good and they won. Southside who won Northide's regional came in second. At overal state where there is money involved Northside won 1st and won $10,000. In my opinion the ironic part is where Northside didn't earn the right to go to state, yet they have won it all.


ps. For those of you who are offended by complainers I am not complaining right now, I am merely laying out the facts.

pss. Some members of this team that cheated have admitted to church youth groups that they saw the questions before the tournament since they were hosting it.

Posted: Sun Apr 25, 2004 2:04 am
by raisinsnacks
I am vexxxed.


A wise man said "Luck is when preparation meets opportunity." Props to Northside and Mullet for winning the state. But dang.

Posted: Sun Apr 25, 2004 2:10 am
by moncal
Don't forget, not only did
Northside got Pine-Bluff'ed into 5A State
but they also
Northside got Pine-Bluff'ed into
$10,000.

Posted: Sun Apr 25, 2004 4:21 pm
by ElectricOtter
A few observations about this year's turn of events...

I'm not sure if the you can connect a Southside/Benton feud with Northside beating them in that game. I was moderating that one, and the thing that destroyed Benton was the lightning round. Northside did very well in theirs, but, unfortunately for Benton, the lightning round they picked had paragraph long descriptors. Despite the fact I was reading faster than I thought I could, we only were able to get through maybe five of them. The point swing in that roudn alone could account for Northside's victory. Also, talking to a few of the Benton players, they didn't really consider a Southside feud to be the cause of their loss.

Against Conway, well, it's the blasted Conway curse. In quiz bowl history, we have beaten Larry Jones once. No matter how good we were, or how bad they were, we couldn't beat those guys. The one time we played them my senior year, after ripping through the PACE field, we struggled against Northside. At the southside tournament this year, after beating everyone else, they struggled against Northside. This year at state, after doing well all day, Northside beat them. Every team has that one other team they can't beat, no matter how hard they try. Southside had Dardenelle, Conway has Northside.

In my eyes, however, I think the biggest travesty of this turn of events is that Jason Loy, quite possibly the nicest person I've met in my entire life and one of the best quiz bowl players in Arkansas history did not receive an overall state championship, and every year it has been a result of a horrible lightning round. In the name of all things holy I hope they get some better questions next year. The last 3 years have been nothing short of horrid.

Robbie

Posted: Sun Apr 25, 2004 7:16 pm
by raisinsnacks
I guess the Benton/Southside thing rattled us a whole lot more than it did Benton.

I just read my earlier post, and I think I was a lot harder on some people/teams than I should have been. Cutter was the best team there yesterday. I think that they are the best team in the state.

I still don't have a whole lot of respect for Northside. I think we, Cutter, Benton, and Conway would all have our way with them easily on a decent set of questions. I think Fayetteville, Watson, Dardenelle, and Vilonia are all better than them. They thrive on b.s. questions. The best questions we had all year was incidentally the tournament that should have eliminated Northside (5A West).

Posted: Sun Apr 25, 2004 9:10 pm
by wampus04
My hope is only that not only will AGQBA realize their mistake in not dealing with the Pine Bluff situation, but in choosing questions that were, on the whole, inconsistent, lacked pronunciation keys at regionals, and had 60-second rounds that, of the 3, often only had 1 doable round. The lightning round discrepancies were prevalent throughout all three levels of tournaments, from a state capitals lightning round thrown in in the regional final match that caused several teams who should have won either final matches or 3rd place games to be defeated by close margins (Southside, Central, and as much as I don't want to admit it, Northside). This became a common theme in the later tournaments, assisting in Benton's downfall, causing our demise (Northside chose Russian Composers after every composer round of the day was simplistic...they got 9 out of 10...I would've ran it myself, but they missed Russian and Ludmilla by Glinka...then we got Famous Deaths, a round similar to Benton's final lightning round, and it caused a points swing that was impossible for us to overcome, though we got so close :o ), and then inevitably deciding the State Finals. I understand that it is necessary for the state to not go spend an insane amount of money on questions, but the quality of these were miserable. In the state quarterfinals, 2 matches had combined scores of 90 points out of 200 after the first round. That's only 9 tossups answered correctly by both teams out of 20 in our format. The fact that AGQBA wimped out on the Pine Bluff ruling is one thing, but it's not a recurring thing...choosing good questions year after year is a necessity, and this year, the questions were simply terrible. For a state tournament that gives out $10,000 to the winner, the questions need to be better.

Oh, and Jason, your team deserved to win yesterday, you were the best there, and even if you didn't win, everyone else knows you're better.

Posted: Sun Apr 25, 2004 9:51 pm
by bucktowntiger
On question choice: Neil Jones made a bid to write the questions for 2004 (he wrote the 2000 questions, IMO the best AGQBA questions ever), but he was turned down because he wasn't the lowest bidder. Big Six questions was the lowest bid, and we all know what happened.

I've been asked to submit a question bid for 2005, but AGQBA seems to not be willing to pay for the best questions available; they're obviously interested in thrift (understandable in the wake of state budget cuts and the Lake View stuff). Besides, I'll probably be too busy anyway.

Posted: Sun Apr 25, 2004 10:43 pm
by buzzermaster
Congrats to Northside for winning yet another state title. It was a fitting end of the career of one of the nation's best coaches, Larry Jones. Also, congratulations to all the teams that competed Saturday. Contrary to what Robbie posted, Cutter did not lose because of uneven lightning rounds. True, we did select a harder one than Northside did, but we had plenty of chances to win the game which I spoiled by making plenty of stupid mistakes. I lost because I didn't play as well as I could have. If anyone lost due to b.s. questions, it was Southside. When we played them, I remember several instances where misleading hooks cost them points. For example, Nic buzzed in early on a description of Euler's law, but the answer to the question was 2. That game's lightning rounds were more uneven than the finals. We picked early 1800s American history, which was very easy, while Southside picked an insane Numbers round, which asked for information like the number of letters in the Hawaiian alphabet (which they answered correctly, amazingly). And since when does Northside thrive on b.s. questions? Most of their knowledge is academic and canonical (if noncanonical is raisinsnacks' definition of b.s.), and other than the "facetious" tossup, all of their points during the Cutter game came on straightforward academic questions, to the best of my memory. If this is inaccurate, someone please correct me. And as for raisinsnacks' claim that Vilonia should have beaten Northside just because they were leading by 25 with 8 questions left, since when did late game comebacks become illegitimate and an unfair way of winning a game?

Despite the complaints I had mentioned earlier, I thought the questions were decent (not perfect by any means, and maybe not even good) overall, although a bit harder than we're used to in Arkansas and somewhat noncanonical. But can we really expect a question company to correspond completely with our definition of "academic" and our conception of proper difficulty? The state's ASCN-ish format lends itself to a good deal of unfairness due to game structure in general and practically invites bids from leagues of subpar question companies. It is far easier to write one-liners and lightning rounds than it is to write good pyramidal questions. Since there have been complaints with the outcome of the state playoffs ever since Northside and Benton ceased to utterly dominate the state, the best solution to this problem would be to change the long-standing Arkansas format. Not long ago, someone proposed a worksheet lightning round in which teams could pick the same lightning round so scores would not be determined less by the caliber of the opposing team, but the coaches' association voted against the idea. WHY??

Back on topic. In short, it's a stretch to say I deserved the state title. Northside made fewer stupid mistakes and generally played better than we did. I hope they find a worthy replacement for Mr. Jones.

Peace,

Jason

Posted: Sun Apr 25, 2004 10:43 pm
by jewtemplar
wampus04 wrote:they missed Russian and Ludmilla by Glinka...
Glinka was the founder of Russian musical nationalism, but he was not that blatant. It's Ruslan. Sorry to quibble, but perhaps I am saving someone out there from an unfortunate neg by doing so.

Posted: Sun Apr 25, 2004 10:48 pm
by moncal
They need to do something. We all got screwed. The only team that didn't get screwed was Pine Bluff and that was only because they cheated. Most of us got screwed out of what we should have gotten but Northside got screwed into $10,000. It's not really fair. The only way to win was to get lucky. Jason, get Northside at ASCN.

Posted: Sun Apr 25, 2004 10:52 pm
by buzzermaster
That will not be possible because I will be in Mexico. Although beating Northside isn't one of my life goals, I'll be busy preparing the rest of my team to go in my absence.

Posted: Mon Apr 26, 2004 12:04 am
by raisinsnacks
I don't really have my way with words. I'm new at this written English thing...I didn't mean that Northside's win over Vilonia was illegitimate. I meant Vilonia should have won that game in the same sense that I mean sometimes walking away from a game: "Wow. We should not have won that game." Northside was playing like crap, got a few in a row, got Vilonia rattled, and won the game. The comeback made it a fair win for Northside, but I think if they played again, Vilonia would win. That's what I meant by: "Vilonia should have won that game."

And by b.s., I mean the questions were just absurd. I have never heard of most of the science terms they asked, and many questions were misleading, without proper context or enough information, or had multiple answers. It is obvious that whoever was writing questions was an English major who had opened a physics book to the glossary. I can't really speak for the other subjects as much, but I know the science questions were absurd.

The balance didn't play to our strengths at all, which is probably why I hated the questions so much. The math was decent, but we only got two per match. We can usually count on fifty free points per match from math. The art and english focused heavily terminology rather than works, which caught us by surprise. The history was focused on Euro, which is just a bunch of inbreds to me. And the science questions just plain sucked.

And I don't mean to be hatin so much on Northside. They are our friends. Friends that we want to see lose, but they are still our good friends.

Cheers.

props to Jason

Posted: Mon Apr 26, 2004 12:59 am
by vblindsay
I completly understand about stupid mistakes. Looking back on the whole Overall tournment and especially our quarter-final game, there were so many stupid mistakes that I knew better. But I'm glad we lost to such an awesome guy, Jason. (and by the way, that was all me on the hawaiian alphebet!)

Crazy the way things ended up this year. I hate that a team we beat to make the finals of our region and got fourth in it came back to win the Overall championship, it just doesn't seem quite fair. But I found it all together fitting for Jones' last year. But everyone is right, Jason you were the best there and we all know it. Hope to see everyone at ASU-Bebe for the all-star tournment. And thanks to everyone for making it a quite memorable year!