Scaled Flowerpiercer wrote:So, this is happening again last year.
Communi-Bear Silo State wrote:Scaled Flowerpiercer wrote:So, this is happening again last year.
NAC has time travel now?
Sulawesi Myzomela wrote:I'm disappointed to see Daviess County attending NAC again. I don't know how much they know about other nationals, but they're in my area and I wish they were at NSC or HSNCT considering how good they were this year.
What I'm most curious about is the participation of JV and middle school teams at NAC. For a guy who accused other tournaments of being "JV nationals" just a few years ago, it looks like Chip is the only one running an actual JV national tournament. While I don't feel any such event is necessary, I wonder if this one of the few things keeping NAC viable in the eyes of the teams that attend.
As for middle school teams, I'm hoping that MSNCT is going to keep middle school NAC from becoming too entrenched. A standalone middle school national tournament is obviously going to have more legitimacy than whatever NAC is, and MSNCT seems like a big success so far.
Horned Screamer wrote:Boo to Hawken, James Island, Copley, St. Ignatius, LAMP, Ardsley, Booker T. Washington, and all the other teams here who should know better. You can't really begrudge the teams who are unaware of other nationals or any of the problems with Chip for making the unlucky decision to register for this event, but all of the teams who actively choose to spend money on this tournament despite knowing about the problems with this event and the alternative nationals really need to cut this crap out.
cchiego wrote:
- Don't know any better (outreach failure)
- Misconceptions about Good Questions or Good Nationals (information failure)
- Fossilized Admin/Coach (institutional failure)
- Trophy Whores Who Know Very Well What They're Doing (morality failure)
cchiego wrote:I count 48 at Chicago, 84 at Washington, and 48 at NO
cchiego wrote:- Don't know any better (outreach failure)
- Misconceptions about Good Questions or Good Nationals (information failure)
- Fossilized Admin/Coach (institutional failure)
- Trophy Whores Who Know Very Well What They're Doing (morality failure)
Anonymous wrote:naqt is much worse than plagiarism could ever hope to be
William Crotch wrote:cchiego wrote:- Don't know any better (outreach failure)
- Misconceptions about Good Questions or Good Nationals (information failure)
- Fossilized Admin/Coach (institutional failure)
- Trophy Whores Who Know Very Well What They're Doing (morality failure)
North Babylon fits the second of those. They went to HSNCT once, decided they didn't like it, and started playinginstead.
I assume the Smithtowns fit under the third category. They've always gone to the NAC, but what's really weird is how drastically their regular season has changed. A few years ago they were attending every single tournament on Long Island with multiple teams, but this year all they've done is go to some bizarre tournament in a part of Maryland nobody's heard of.
Down and out in Quintana Roo wrote:The attendance of High Tech is probably the most distressing here. They are a great quizbowl team but this is a huge mistake, and a waste of their time and money to go to this.
We are attending because the varsity team does not feel it is fair to divert district resources from younger teams due to our district's specific policies* with funding competitions.
The Predictable Consequences wrote:William Crotch wrote:cchiego wrote:- Don't know any better (outreach failure)
- Misconceptions about Good Questions or Good Nationals (information failure)
- Fossilized Admin/Coach (institutional failure)
- Trophy Whores Who Know Very Well What They're Doing (morality failure)
North Babylon fits the second of those. They went to HSNCT once, decided they didn't like it, and started playinginstead.
I assume the Smithtowns fit under the third category. They've always gone to the NAC, but what's really weird is how drastically their regular season has changed. A few years ago they were attending every single tournament on Long Island with multiple teams, but this year all they've done is go to some bizarre tournament in a part of Maryland nobody's heard of.
I think North Babylon's actually in the third category. I talked to Brian during a taping of The Challenge, and it seems like the team prefers NAQT, but they weren't able to convince their coach to go to HSNCT this year
Sulawesi Myzomela wrote:What I'm most curious about is the participation of JV and middle school teams at NAC. For a guy who accused other tournaments of being "JV nationals" just a few years ago, it looks like Chip is the only one running an actual JV national tournament.
cchiego wrote:- Don't know any better (outreach failure)
- Misconceptions about Good Questions or Good Nationals (information failure)
- Fossilized Admin/Coach (institutional failure)
- Trophy Whores Who Know Very Well What They're Doing (morality failure)
nationalhistorybeeandbowl wrote:the three-site set up ... I wonder if NAQT would ever consider going over to this model.
Has anyone looked and seen how many of the teams going to NAC actually qualified for HSNCT?
cchiego wrote:- Don't know any better (outreach failure)
- Misconceptions about Good Questions or Good Nationals (information failure)
- Fossilized Admin/Coach (institutional failure)
- Trophy Whores Who Know Very Well What They're Doing (morality failure)
nationalhistorybeeandbowl wrote:You can throw NSC into the mix here too, I know, but the level of difficulty of the teams and questions there
Matt Weiner wrote:at some point, the [HSNCT] will become too physically large to run at one site in one day, and will end up doing some sort of split prelim across Saturday and Sunday with playoffs on Monday. Surely they picked Memorial Day weekend for a reason...
Matt Weiner wrote:I think one of the issues with the multi-site model is that teams not in the title hunt don't get the "nationals experience" of playing the best teams, watching the title games, etc. Obviously it's impossible to play the best teams at NAC in the first place, but it's sort of weird to have a three-day tournament that ends with the crowning of the....team that qualifies for the semifinals in two weeks, rather than the champion. Both because of that and because of the extreme dilution of field quality necessary to attract 150 teams to the NAC in the era of exactly 2 Top 50 programs participating, I doubt you will see the NSC move to a similar model.
Matt Weiner wrote:nationalhistorybeeandbowl wrote:You can throw NSC into the mix here too, I know, but the level of difficulty of the teams and questions there
Given that NSC has been the statistically easiest national tournament for 10 years running
nationalhistorybeeandbowl wrote:How much of this is a function of who goes to it, though? In any case, the field itself is far and away the strongest field (NASAT aside) at any Nationals so if you consider difficulty not as a function of tossups converted but as how a theoretical team ranked outside the top 150 or so would do against the teams that go there, the point still holds.
nationalhistorybeeandbowl wrote:What do you say to those teams who don't qualify for either HSNCT or NSC?
Matt Weiner wrote:Good point about difficilty. Given that NSC has been the statistically easiest national tournament for 10 years running, it's likely that some bad teams avoid it since their chances of pulling out an undeserved win through lucking out on what material happens to be answerable in a given round are substantially lower than at NAC, where random trivia with no relevance to academic topics skews every game.
Scaled Flowerpiercer wrote:As someone who was played many QUnlimited packets, I can say pretty definitely that, not counting the nearly-unanswerable obscurata, NAC questions are vastly easier than NSC questions, no matter how much easier it is than HSNCT, except for a select few, I imagine most of NAC's field would get <100 ppg on NSC questions (against equal competition).
Fred wrote:Scaled Flowerpiercer wrote:As someone who was played many QUnlimited packets, I can say pretty definitely that, not counting the nearly-unanswerable obscurata, NAC questions are vastly easier than NSC questions, no matter how much easier it is than HSNCT, except for a select few, I imagine most of NAC's field would get <100 ppg on NSC questions (against equal competition).
I think that's a key point of Weiner's statement.
Scaled Flowerpiercer wrote:As someone who was played many QUnlimited packets, I can say pretty definitely that, not counting the nearly-unanswerable obscurata, NAC questions are vastly easier than NSC questions, no matter how much easier it is than HSNCT, except for a select few, I imagine most of NAC's field would get <100 ppg on NSC questions (against equal competition).
My view on HSNCT is that, at some point, the tournament will become too physically large to run at one site in one day, and will end up doing some sort of split prelim across Saturday and Sunday with playoffs on Monday. Surely they picked Memorial Day weekend for a reason...
cchiego wrote:Trophy Whores Who Know Very Well What They're Doing (morality failure)
theMoMA wrote:cchiego wrote:Trophy Whores Who Know Very Well What They're Doing (morality failure)
So basically you have fewer teams and the possibility that anyone can win. There are a lot more teams actually competing for the trophy.
Additionally, I think that some older coaches don't like the determinism of good quizbowl, where the better team wins a vast majority of the time. They would rather have bad, random questions with a chance to win than good, answerable questions with a much-reduced chance. This is certainly a moral failure, but it's one that we have a tough time countering.
the return of AHAN wrote:theMoMA wrote:cchiego wrote:Trophy Whores Who Know Very Well What They're Doing (morality failure)
So basically you have fewer teams and the possibility that anyone can win. There are a lot more teams actually competing for the trophy.
This has NOT been the case with Junior NAC. Longfellow has run over the field for the past three years, and we know they're a top 3 program during that stretch.
nationalhistorybeeandbowl wrote:Has anyone looked and seen how many of the teams going to NAC actually qualified for HSNCT?
Scaled Flowerpiercer wrote:the return of AHAN wrote:theMoMA wrote:cchiego wrote:Trophy Whores Who Know Very Well What They're Doing (morality failure)
So basically you have fewer teams and the possibility that anyone can win. There are a lot more teams actually competing for the trophy.
This has NOT been the case with Junior NAC. Longfellow has run over the field for the past three years, and we know they're a top 3 program during that stretch.
There is still a positive correlation between "knowing things and being good at quizbowl" and "performing well at NAC," the size of the coefficient is significantly less than at NSC or HSNCT, but it still exists. For example, while Fred Morlan's rankings of teams last year had a correlation of 0.880297 with placement at NSC, playoff seeds at Chicago NAC had a 0.682806324 correlation with final placement at Chicago NAC* (Which, if anyone cares, leaves Morlan with an R^2=.7749, and NAC seeds with R^2=.466224)
*In theory this could be lower as first round byes tip the scale in correlation's favor
So clearly, there is SOME correlation between doing well and continuing to do well, it's not ENTIRELY random at NAC, but it is certainly much more random and there is much greater room for upsets based on luck.
jonpin wrote:What you've shown is that there is a positive though not sensational correlation between "Doing well at NAC on Saturday" and "Doing well at NAC on Sunday", where teams that are eliminated at the same time in a single-elimination tournament are almost surely ranked in the same order as their seeds. So there is such a skill as "good at Chip-bowl", but that doesn't mean that is identical to "good at quiz bowl".
Edward Cullen Bryant wrote:I'd love to see how last year's NAC champs would have fared at HSNCT just as much as I would like to see how last year's HSNCT champ would have done at NAC. Harrison could have been a top-bracket team for all we know (or they could have went 4-6) but NAC is so wack that we can't really be sure if State College would have made it to the final stage.
Edward Cullen Bryant wrote:As an aside regarding Longfellow, I was talking with their coach at History Bowl nationals, he said that he has forever severed ties with Chip. The only reason he went was that Junior NAC was the only Middle School championship, and Mr. Huang likes winning national championships as much as the next guy. But now that MSNCT exists he has no reason to deal withand won't.
Edward Cullen Bryant wrote:A top NAC team, given a year of playing pyramidal and with some motivation to adjust to the format, could do really well. I think the reverse would also be true, but I don't want to test that because that's just cruel.
I'd love to see how last year's NAC champs would have fared at HSNCT just as much as I would like to see how last year's HSNCT champ would have done at NAC. Harrison could have been a top-bracket team for all we know (or they could have went 4-6) but NAC is so wack that we can't really be sure if State College would have made it to the final stage.
The Predictable Consequences wrote:Edward Cullen Bryant wrote:A top NAC team, given a year of playing pyramidal and with some motivation to adjust to the format, could do really well. I think the reverse would also be true, but I don't want to test that because that's just cruel.
I'd love to see how last year's NAC champs would have fared at HSNCT just as much as I would like to see how last year's HSNCT champ would have done at NAC. Harrison could have been a top-bracket team for all we know (or they could have went 4-6) but NAC is so wack that we can't really be sure if State College would have made it to the final stage.
oh hi there
Ben Dillon wrote: They do, however, stick with NAC, so they will not be attending HSNCT or NSC.
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