On-going season rankings

[Grams's Go-Go Boots]

Cutting to the chase, Cistercian played with its full team from last year's HSNCT for the first time this year. This same team will be playing at both PACE NSC and HSNCT. In our full truly full strength tournament, we soundly beat the 25th ranked team (St. Marks) soundly, thrice. Additionally, we out-convert them on bonuses (23.69 to 22.48). Further, we destroy them in 15pg (5.5 to 4.4) despite having to play the top team in the nation (LASA A) thrice (oh, and the 25th team in the nation thrice, playing 50% of our games against top 25 teams). Now, to quote Stephanie Ferguson, I ask, "Where is the Love?"

Edited: added fact that we had to put up power stats against St.Marks in addition to LASA

The love is right around 34th place right now.

[Grams's Go-Go Boots]

Hunter A beat LASA A twice at Harvard's Delta Burke
Wissahickon beat Hunter A at St. Joseph's BATE
Wilmington Charter C beat Wissahickon at the Blue Hen
E. O. Smith A beat Wilmington Charter C at the Yale Fall Acacdemic Tournament
Ranney beat E. O. Smith at Bloomfield's BATE (not on the BATE set though)

Ranney School is going to be the new #1 next time, by 5 wins.

[Down and out in Quintana Roo]

Hunter A beat LASA A twice at Harvard's Delta Burke
Wissahickon beat Hunter A at St. Joseph's BATE
Wilmington Charter C beat Wissahickon at the Blue Hen
E. O. Smith A beat Wilmington Charter C at the Yale Fall Acacdemic Tournament
Ranney beat E. O. Smith at Bloomfield's BATE (not on the BATE set though)

Ranney School is going to be the new #1 next time, by 5 wins.

Hmm. Your ideas are intriguing to me and i wish to subscribe to your newsletter.

I fully approve of this logic.

[Transparent Pudding]

Hunter A beat LASA A twice at Harvard's Delta Burke
Wissahickon beat Hunter A at St. Joseph's BATE
Wilmington Charter C beat Wissahickon at the Blue Hen
E. O. Smith A beat Wilmington Charter C at the Yale Fall Acacdemic Tournament
Ranney beat E. O. Smith at Bloomfield's BATE (not on the BATE set though)

Ranney School is going to be the new #1 next time, by 5 wins.

Hmm. Your ideas are intriguing to me and i wish to subscribe to your newsletter.

I fully approve of this logic.

Ranney's actually pretty decent, they gave us a run for our money at last year's Delaware Fall tournament.

[Grams's Go-Go Boots]

Ranney is a solid team. That's just as far as I could take that chain in the ten minutes I had.

[theflyingdeutschman]

Who are Alan Wright and Obasan? They are hilarious.

[Tanay]

I'm Obasan. I think Alan Wright might be an actual person, though.

[theflyingdeutschman]

I'm Obasan. I think Alan Wright might be an actual person, though.

Your post about Nigeria is hilarious (Although it would be tough to travel all the way to Somalia, let alone survive in Somalia), but Alan seems like an ass,

Saying "Yes, but our regional set tests knowledge just as well [if not better] than those other sets you mentioned [the only one of which I've heard of is NAQT.] These questions are very good and so are we." Is just not true and obnoxious

PS: Is Obasan a reference to the Joy Kogawa book?

[Tanay]

PS: Is Obasan a reference to the Joy Kogawa book?

I was thinking of Obasanjo (the Nigerian leader), and I think I subconsciously typed Obasan, which I know as a book and not as a common Nigerian name. Apparently it exists as a name, though.

[Nun's puffs]

Because I have all the time in the world right now, here's some insight into the true winner of last year's HSNCT:
State College A lost to Maggie Walker Governor's School 3 times
Maggie Walker Governor's School lost to Dorman A 355-415
Dorman A lost to LASA A 245-420
LASA A lost to Raleigh Charter A 220-330
Raleigh Charter A lost to duPont Manual 245-445
duPont Manual lost to Oak Park and River Forest 295-355
Oak Park and River Forest lost to North Babylon A 165-175
North Babylon A lost to St. Joseph's 125-155
St. Joseph's lost to Riverside Brookfield 105-205
Riverside Brookfield lost to Vermillion 100-160
Vermillion lost to Kellenberg B 60-155
Kellenberg B lost to Montverde Academy 75-140
Montverde Academy lost to Stoughton 65-210
Stoughton lost to Kingfisher 95-160
Kingfisher lost to Salem 90-105
Salem lost to Franklin C (which got dead last, probably because NAQT's packets were unfair) 70-100

[Remember-the-Alamo-Remember-Goliad]

Cutting to the chase, Cistercian played with its full team from last year's HSNCT for the first time this year. This same team will be playing at both PACE NSC and HSNCT. In our full truly full strength tournament, we soundly beat the 25th ranked team (St. Marks) soundly, thrice. Additionally, we out-convert them on bonuses (23.69 to 22.48). Further, we destroy them in 15pg (5.5 to 4.4) despite having to play the top team in the nation (LASA A) thrice (oh, and the 25th team in the nation thrice, playing 50% of our games against top 25 teams). Now, to quote Stephanie Ferguson, I ask, "Where is the Love?"

Edited: added fact that we had to put up power stats against St.Marks in addition to LASA

The love is right around 34th place right now.

If love hovers somewhere around 34th place, then I suspect we are dealing with 'love' in Dante's 9th ring of Inferno!
Sacagawea has clearly stated the issues, especially his direct comparison of the results coming out of the St. Mark's tournament. We played them 3 times and we clearly beat them 3 times - end of story. But not really, when their ranking is 25th and ours is 34th. "Love hath no fury like" a team denied its proper place in the sun.

And, the injustice visited upon us at the TQBA State meet continues to plague us, despite what some have argued. When you are DENIED the right to compete, you CANNOT improve your rankings. And due to an official's errors, Cistercian 'A' was denied its right to compete, period.

[Inkana7]

seriously fred stop hating on cistercian

[Remember-the-Alamo-Remember-Goliad]

James, I think the biggest problem that Fred (and the people who vote in the polls) have had in ranking Cistercian is that you guys have only very rarely played with your full team this year. We in Texas know that Cistercian is a good team, but it's difficult to pin down where you are in relation to the LASA teams, Seven Lakes and St. Mark's because we've not really seen you and Vimal play together against those other teams very often. In the end though, I wouldn't worry too much about it - I'd guess Cistercian is poised to make nice runs into the playoffs of both HSNCT and NSC this year, regardless of where you guys are ranked.

While Cassian's kind words are appreciated by me, I think it should be pointed out that if there is any team listed here who hasn't been seen much playing locally/regionally/etc. it has been St. Mark's, not Cistercian. A quick check of the NAQT web site will verify that. Once again, when you are denied the right to play at the State NAQT meet (As Cistercian was) because an official wrongfully removes your team from competition, I think it is misguided and unfair to play our imposed disadvantage into the hands of another team's advantage in the rankings. And I just don't see how that point can be refuted -- it's a fact. We were wrongfully removed from a key tournament where we could have improved our rankings but were denied our right by an official's error.

[Chandragupta Maurya]

Cutting to the chase, Cistercian played with its full team from last year's HSNCT for the first time this year. This same team will be playing at both PACE NSC and HSNCT. In our full truly full strength tournament, we soundly beat the 25th ranked team (St. Marks) soundly, thrice. Additionally, we out-convert them on bonuses (23.69 to 22.48). Further, we destroy them in 15pg (5.5 to 4.4) despite having to play the top team in the nation (LASA A) thrice (oh, and the 25th team in the nation thrice, playing 50% of our games against top 25 teams). Now, to quote Stephanie Ferguson, I ask, "Where is the Love?"

Edited: added fact that we had to put up power stats against St.Marks in addition to LASA

The love is right around 34th place right now.

Given this, though, shouldn't Cistercian at least be ranked ahead of St. Mark's?

[Vernon Lee Bad Marriage, Jr.]

Cutting to the chase, Cistercian played with its full team from last year's HSNCT for the first time this year. This same team will be playing at both PACE NSC and HSNCT. In our full truly full strength tournament, we soundly beat the 25th ranked team (St. Marks) soundly, thrice. Additionally, we out-convert them on bonuses (23.69 to 22.48). Further, we destroy them in 15pg (5.5 to 4.4) despite having to play the top team in the nation (LASA A) thrice (oh, and the 25th team in the nation thrice, playing 50% of our games against top 25 teams). Now, to quote Stephanie Ferguson, I ask, "Where is the Love?"

Edited: added fact that we had to put up power stats against St.Marks in addition to LASA

The love is right around 34th place right now.

If love hovers somewhere around 34th place, then I suspect we are dealing with 'love' in Dante's 9th ring of Inferno!
Sacagawea has clearly stated the issues, especially his direct comparison of the results coming out of the St. Mark's tournament. We played them 3 times and we clearly beat them 3 times - end of story. But not really, when their ranking is 25th and ours is 34th. "Love hath no fury like" a team denied its proper place in the sun.

And, the injustice visited upon us at the TQBA State meet continues to plague us, despite what some have argued. When you are DENIED the right to compete, you CANNOT improve your rankings. And due to an official's errors, Cistercian 'A' was denied its right to compete, period.

With all due respect, Father, these rankings mean basically nothing. They're fun to look at, and they're useful for getting a vague idea of who's good this year. Other than that, they're really not especially meaningful, and totally not worth getting worked up over. Fred has limited time and 100 teams to deal with, and I bet pretty much every team on that list thinks they're better than they're ranked: you very well may be underrated, but pointing Fred to stats he's already seen and incorporated into his decision isn't necessarily going to change his mind.

On the other hand, if you do well at nationals, the public's opinion of your team is sure to go up. Good luck!

[Madagascar Serpent Eagle]

I think that what people are forgetting is that these rankings are off of points per bonus. You were unfairly removed from competition at that tournament, but, from what I understand, the statistics have now been fixed. Fred's rankings are based on points per bonus. Your points per bonus that are in the stats now are right. Therefore, your ranking reflects those points per bonus.

Now, whether or not points per bonus is the best way to do rankings is a separate issue. But you can't complain about your team's ranking, based on points per bonus, when your team put up the points per bonus that Fred has you putting up.

[theflyingdeutschman]

People complaining:
Wait for the next rankings. You have stated your grievances, Fred has acknowledged them. If he thinks they are valid, you will be ranked higher next time. Sustained pestering will just annoy people. This is Fred's opinion, and at the end of the day, he has the last word. He isn't going to issue a new set of rankings to please one team.

[Remember-the-Alamo-Remember-Goliad]

With all due respect, Father, these rankings mean basically nothing. They're fun to look at, and they're useful for getting a vague idea of who's good this year. Other than that, they're really not especially meaningful, and totally not worth getting worked up over. Fred has limited time and 100 teams to deal with, and I bet pretty much every team on that list thinks they're better than they're ranked: you very well may be underrated, but pointing Fred to stats he's already seen and incorporated into his decision isn't necessarily going to change his mind.

On the other hand, if you do well at nationals, the public's opinion of your team is sure to go up. Good luck![/quote]

Mr. Bollinger certainly makes a valid point -- after all, it's a GAME. And FRED is certainly doing one and all a service by crunching the numbers and coming out with a reasoned opinion -- one which I respectfully decline to accept. Elsewhere, Mr. Bollinger may be relieved to know that I've actually written that 'underdogs' have a certain strategic advantage, having disarmed their opponents by lulling them into an attitude of complacency. And, my students' hopes for NAQT nationals are, indeed, set high. So, calmly, placidly, even monastically, I'll thank this son of Jefferson at UVA for his kind and soothing words and wish him and all a very simple "A bientot" or better 'Hasta la proxima'!

[Grams's Go-Go Boots]

If you want to see one of the more ridiculous series of posts in hsqb's history, click here!

[List of Fighting Spirit characters]

I appreciate what Fred does and I'll continue to appreciate his rankings. He puts a lot of time and effort into this. This is the one reasons I don't like polls: Someone is always going to call foul because they feel they got shafted. Maybe that school isn't top 100 worthy in the first place, not that it has to do anything with religious affiliation. *facepalm* My team has finished in the top 15% of two out of state NAQT tournaments (4/36 and 4/24) this year, however we aren't even ranked in the top 15 in our own state poll. It has nothing to do with the fact we are Fisher Catholic, its just because we aren't one of Ohio's top 15 teams in the eyes of the pollsters. Does it really matter to me? Not really, because even the #1 team in the polls isn't the #1 team in the state if they end up getting knocked out in round 3 of our OAC regionals tournament in two weeks.

Bottom line: Polls are fun, they are resourceful. No, they are not always truly indicative of a team thats in and one thats out of the poll. The real game is on the buzzer set.

According to Father Schweers, the entirety of HSNCT and NSC are processed through the painstakingly comprehensive (and might I say, anti-Catholic) algorithms residing in the exalted mind of Fred Morlan. I propose that we dispense with the formality and pomp of holding the actual tournaments, trusting the esteemed Mr. Morlan's unfathomably powerful intellect to encompass all possible data points to a degree that one deterministic, immutable future in the world of high school quiz bowl will be actualized. Doing this will spare many teams much expense in traveling to Atlanta and Chicago, and they will be the happier for it.

[evilmonkey]

According to Father Schweers, the entirety of HSNCT and NSC are processed through the painstakingly comprehensive (and might I say, anti-Catholic) algorithms residing in the exalted mind of Fred Morlan. I propose that we dispense with the formality and pomp of holding the actual tournaments, trusting the esteemed Mr. Morlan's unfathomably powerful intellect to encompass all possible data points to a degree that one deterministic, immutable future in the world of high school quiz bowl will be actualized. Doing this will spare many teams much expense in traveling to Atlanta and Chicago, and they will be the happier for it.

So, like, what you just said is "Oh, hey, all the cool kids are ridiculing this dumb statement someone made, so even though I don't know Fr. Schweers personally, and haven't really been around quizbowl all that long, I'll add some things to make that statement even more ridiculous and make fun of that even more extreme statement, even though it was never said, just to try to earn some points in their eyes. Oh, by the way, I'm not actually going to add anything constructive to the discussion by doing this." (Is dragged off stage tempban, not to be see again some measure of time, satisfied by his new understanding of the frustrated board posts of his elders).

Constructively, as a (somewhat bad) Catholic, I see nothing whatsoever that could lead to a conclusion of anti-Catholicism. I even googled "schindler anti-catholicism" to ensure there was nothing from the movie that I had forgotten - there wasn't. I really hope Father Schweers has some sort of explanation for his bizarre accusation. I feel like there must be something going on here that isn't obvious within this thread. OTOH, that may just be me having faith in the essential goodness of humanity.

More constructively, I'd really like to thank Fred for putting in the huge amount of time and effort needed to produce this. I believe that this ranking is realistically more helpful to the larger quizbowl community than the top 25 rankings (which do serve their own purpose). The elite teams that litter the ranks of the top 25 KNOW they are elite. Fred's rankings give non-elite teams a sense of where they measure up. For that, Fred, I thank you.

If you ask to be martyred your request will be granted. User was banned for 1 month for backseat modding in a post that expresses full knowledge of the rule he is breaking. --the mgmt

[cchiego]

To turn away from rather crazy (perhaps sarcastic?) allegations of bias:

Is there any way to try to "correct" for the SOS of teams playing the same set at different sites around the country? Could something like generating an NAQT D-value for each set, then perhaps averaging out a team's performances at various tournaments compared to other teams work? Without SOS, I agree that Fred's rankings that primarily value PPB and %p (although at the highest level, that's also SOS dependent to some extent) are probably the best metrics to use.

There's also then the problem of teams that play very few tournaments and trying to account for the larger confidence intervals for their performances. Some teams may also get better over time- I think that more weight should be paid on more recent results.

I'm trying to figure out some way to account for teams that don't have all their top players together at a tournament. I wouldn't want to discount that result entirely, but I also wouldn't want to try to generate some crazy estimate how well they'd do if they had had that player. I'd be curious to see though in the aggregate how much this effect has on the final rankings if the absences are not too often and there's sufficient data otherwise.

Finally, I also think that there should be- at the margins- something to account for teams that may underperform other teams statistically but still consistently overperform in the Wins category. Call it "grit" or something. Perhaps this is better off as a subjective evaluation, but I'd be curious to compare data from the past against this data in the future (i.e. do such teams continue to overperform at nats?).

I hope people also realize that even the best ranking system can't be perfect. You can try to get the procedure to be as fair as possible, but the results may still vary. Teams may study hard in the interim, have a bad night before the tournament, get a packet that just doesn't suit them, run into a particularly inspired team, etc. There will always be a few teams that feel shafted and that's not going to go away.

[Tanay]

Oh, hey, all the cool kids are ridiculing this dumb statement someone made

This happens all the time and is basically not a big deal. There is precedent so big you can't even quantify it for people making silly posts and getting reasonably criticized by the community for it.

so even though I don't know Fr. Schweers personally

This is true of many, many criticisms that occur on the forums, especially with regards to people in more spread-out circuits. How many people outside of Texas know Father Schweers personally? Or Ankit? Or Montana's quizbowlers?

and haven't really been around quizbowl all that long

There are people posting in this thread from the high school classes of 2014 and 2013, as well as some others from 2012. Since it seems to matter to you, Ankit has accomplished more than almost all of them. Why is he being singled out again?

just to try to earn some points in their eyes.

Yeah, this is basically not an Ankit-like thing to do at all. Interesting that you criticize him for talking about someone he doesn't know personally.

I'll add some things to make that statement even more ridiculous and make fun of that even more extreme statement

Dude, the point is still pretty much true. By his own admission, Father Schweers has given undue significance to the hsqbrank polls, stating that they will have major effects on his team's seeding/placement at national tournaments.

I'll add some things to make that statement even more ridiculous

Taking stuff out of context happens all the time, especially in jest. I think it's pretty clear that these criticisms would apply equally, but would not be happening, if Ankit was a college student from a well-established circuit.

In conclusion, I'm baffled by the fact that my teammate's post is summarily ripped apart because it's a bit more jestful than you might have liked. I doubt that your response would have been the same if an identical post was made by any one of scores of people who post on this site.

[Matt Weiner]

Everyone stop metaposting.

[Down and out in Quintana Roo]

So, uh, let's talk about how LASA is ranked ahead of State College or something...

[TheKingInYellow]

Everyone stop metaposting.

Heh

[cvdwightw]

To turn away from rather crazy (perhaps sarcastic?) allegations of bias:

Is there any way to try to "correct" for the SOS of teams playing the same set at different sites around the country? Could something like generating an NAQT D-value for each set, then perhaps averaging out a team's performances at various tournaments compared to other teams work? Without SOS, I agree that Fred's rankings that primarily value PPB and %p (although at the highest level, that's also SOS dependent to some extent) are probably the best metrics to use.

Chris: see here and pages 3 and 4 of this thread. I haven't touched this stuff in about 4 months, but I think that the methodology there is as close as we're going to get to correcting for field strength. Of course, that model has a few problems, such as over-weighting negs against bad teams, that I never bothered to figure out a way around. It is also extremely time-consuming to obtain the necessary raw data unless the data are already in NAQT's SQBS format or it is a small tournament (again: I think it would be cool to use it to predict the winner of HSNCT's double elimination playoffs once all seeds are known, but I will have neither the Monte Carlo quizbowl simulation MATLAB script on my laptop nor the 8+ hours it took me to go through the double-elimination matrices).

I'm trying to figure out some way to account for teams that don't have all their top players together at a tournament. I wouldn't want to discount that result entirely, but I also wouldn't want to try to generate some crazy estimate how well they'd do if they had had that player. I'd be curious to see though in the aggregate how much this effect has on the final rankings if the absences are not too often and there's sufficient data otherwise.

One way to potentially get at this is to look at the difference in adjusted bonus conversion. By this I mean, what was this team's difference in bonus conversion compared to the average of {pick one: all, all of the top n, a random sample of} teams that played the two sets with the same lineup. In other words, we can roughly predict what the team's bonus conversion would have been from the bonus conversion of other teams against which we could compare the team on a different set.

With tossups, it becomes much harder to do this, because individual tossup performance is so variable from tournament to tournament. My brief thought about this goes down the track of using the combined PATH of the same-lineup players, using again teams with the same lineup at two tournaments to quantify differences in set difficulty and field strength.

[Sulawesi Myzomela]

Fred, this is sort of off topic but does pertain to this thread. Is there a way you could make a thread (and pin it) with the link to your blog in it, and also keep this thread for the discussion and all that? That way people who were simply looking for the rankings could find it easily without having to sift through pages of discussion.

[Grams's Go-Go Boots]

I've moved the OAC discussion to this thread.

Apparently, this thread:annoying me::honey:flies.

[Grams's Go-Go Boots]

Fred, this is sort of off topic but does pertain to this thread. Is there a way you could make a thread (and pin it) with the link to your blog in it, and also keep this thread for the discussion and all that? That way people who were simply looking for the rankings could find it easily without having to sift through pages of discussion.

Sure, I've edited it into the top of the first post.

[Sulawesi Myzomela]

Fred, this is sort of off topic but does pertain to this thread. Is there a way you could make a thread (and pin it) with the link to your blog in it, and also keep this thread for the discussion and all that? That way people who were simply looking for the rankings could find it easily without having to sift through pages of discussion.

Sure, I've edited it into the top of the first post.

Awesome, thanks.

[Remember-the-Alamo-Remember-Goliad]

Once the stats are posted for that part of the Texas Invitational held on Friday, I think a number of folk will find there some fascinating indicators about how NAQT Nationals might unfold. While prognistication is never exact (far from it!), it should be helpful.

[TheKingInYellow]

Did Cistercian win, by chance?

[Diocletian]

No.

[Remember-the-Alamo-Remember-Goliad]

Cistercian, win? NO! We had a great time playing on some difficult question sets against some of the best teams in the US. LASA, Seven Lakes, and Dorman were all great competition and were clearly better than we were, but we nonetheless feel very encouraged about the meaning of those results as we look toward NAQT/Nationals. Thanks to Chris Romero for the kind invitation!

[Lion81]

How ironic would it be if Cistercian moved down in the rankings?

[Remember-the-Alamo-Remember-Goliad]

As an English literature teacher, perhaps 'irony' is not the best term to summarize the situation. After all, rankings are a matter of facts, are they not? Aren't rankings a function of number-crunching and stats, if memory serves me correctly? Stating a team's limitations and experiences in a given tournament situation is simply a function of honesty, nothing more. Diogenes seeks honest men and women. If one is afraid of losing a place in rankings, then better for such people to enjoy the comforts of home and stay there. My students prefer the risks of stiff competition. Rankings will take care of themselves.

[Lion81]

I wasn't talking about your last post specifically, and I'm not saying you guys deserve to move down. I'm just saying that, after you guys have spent so much effort arguing that your team should be ranked higher, it would be ironic if your team actually moved down in the rankings. Not saying you did bad in the last tournament.

[Andrew's a Freshman]

Unless I'm mistaken, I don't believe the ICT is comparable enough to any other set that has been played to have a significant impact on these rankings.

[theflyingdeutschman]

As an English literature teacher, perhaps 'irony' is not the best term to summarize the situation. After all, rankings are a matter of facts, are they not? Aren't rankings a function of number-crunching and stats, if memory serves me correctly? Stating a team's limitations and experiences in a given tournament situation is simply a function of honesty, nothing more. Diogenes seeks honest men and women. If one is afraid of losing a place in rankings, then better for such people to enjoy the comforts of home and stay there. My students prefer the risks of stiff competition. Rankings will take care of themselves.

Actually, irony would be a pretty apt term to describe the situation. Websters defines irony as "incongruity between the actual result of a sequence of events and the expected result". You have made your opinion pretty clear in that you believe and expect your team to be ranked higher next time. Therefore, if they were actually ranked lower next time, it would be the opposite of what you expected, and would fit the definition of irony.

Also, it seems you no are no longer worried about your place in the rankings, which is quite odd considering all your previous posts where you kept on bringing up how you were disappointed in your rank.

[Mr. Scogan]

As an English literature teacher, perhaps 'irony' is not the best term to summarize the situation. After all, rankings are a matter of facts, are they not? Aren't rankings a function of number-crunching and stats, if memory serves me correctly? Stating a team's limitations and experiences in a given tournament situation is simply a function of honesty, nothing more. Diogenes seeks honest men and women. If one is afraid of losing a place in rankings, then better for such people to enjoy the comforts of home and stay there. My students prefer the risks of stiff competition. Rankings will take care of themselves.

Actually, irony would be a pretty apt term to describe the situation. Websters defines irony as "incongruity between the actual result of a sequence of events and the expected result". You have made your opinion pretty clear in that you believe and expect your team to be ranked higher next time. Therefore, if they were actually ranked lower next time, it would be the opposite of what you expected, and would fit the definition of irony.

Also, it seems you no are no longer worried about your place in the rankings, which is quite odd considering all your previous posts where you kept on bringing up how you were disappointed in your rank.

It would be ironic pertaining to him in particular, not in general everyone else. I don't think advocating your team moving up is going to bring about your team actually moving on up.

[Grams's Go-Go Boots]

Stop meta-posting.

[Mewto55555]

Discussion on ironies being non-ironic are themselves non-ironic.

[Grams's Go-Go Boots]

I'm hesitant to mention this.

[Ondes Martenot]

OH MY GOD FRED YOU RANKED BERGEN COUNTY #98 YOU CLEARLY HAVE AN ANTI NEW JERSEY BIAS THIS IS COMPLETELY UNACCEPTABLE

[Mewto55555]

For future posters' convenience, I made a handy-dandy template:

Dear Fred,

While I admire the much effort you have put into your rankings, you seem to be chronically underrating [insert team you are affiliated with here]. However, you seem to be favoring [your rival], despite the fact that we have beaten them [X] out of [Y] times we have played them, and of those [Y-X] times we lost, [some integer less than or equal to Y-X] were because [your best player if a coach/the word "I" if a player] was suffering from [make up a word that sounds like a tropical disease]. You also fail to notice that in [insert tournament here] our PPB was within [insert a number here] despite missing [insert player name here]. Also, we once won [insert crappy local tournament] by a score of [insert a number which probably are not divisible by 5, then a -, then another such number]. I realize that none of these rankings actually matter, but I am really disappointed you are being so blatantly unfair to [your team]. Hopefully we will show our true strength at [HSNCT or NSC] once [player name] has gotten over his [Ebola or Trypanosomiasis].

-[your name here]

[sacagawea]

Unless I'm mistaken, I don't believe the ICT is comparable enough to any other set that has been played to have a significant impact on these rankings.

Is this true, which is to say, will the Texas Invitational stats not be considered in future rankings? If not, I understand the argument as to why not implicit in the quoted statement above. Then again, if assessing comparability in difficulty, it seemed as though ICT DII was about as hard as ACF Reg, and if anything, perhaps a tad easier. Additionally, three of the top ten teams in the nation played, so the stats might deserve consideration because they would most likely have some significance in the rankings, particularly among top schools. Ultimately, I pose the questions as a curiosity.

[Duncan Idaho]

Unless I'm mistaken, I don't believe the ICT is comparable enough to any other set that has been played to have a significant impact on these rankings.

Perhaps it's not, but ACF Nationals was included even though it is certainly even less comparable to any of the other sets and fewer teams played it. (Precisely one, State College, did.)

[cchiego]

ICT DII is, if I'm not mistaken, just one step up on the NAQT question difficulty ranking scale from HSNCT (I think HSNCT is a "6" and ICT DII is a "7"). I think it's generally a fine measure to use, particularly for predicting performance at HSNCT.

On that note, I've looked through the results thus far and I can't find much empirical evidence that certain teams are weaker on NAQT than on mACF-style tournaments or vice-versa. Since those differences seemed to matter at nats last year, perhaps there's some qualitative stories out there that can speak to the top teams' abilities on one or the other?

[cvdwightw]

ICT DII is, if I'm not mistaken, just one step up on the NAQT question difficulty ranking scale from HSNCT (I think HSNCT is a "6" and ICT DII is a "7"). I think it's generally a fine measure to use, particularly for predicting performance at HSNCT.

Not to mention that some NAQT writers ([raises hand]) have a hard time judging ideal HSNCT difficulty and will inevitably submit questions on the just-barely-acceptable end of the HSNCT difficulty scale that would be more appropriate at D2ICT but may end up in HSNCT anyway.