Let me say a few things here. I designed the card system used Saturday.
* I got a lot of help from NAQT. They gave me a number of specifications, and they have a great program that verifies the system for a variety of issues (something I needed many times) and that turns the attached spreadsheet into actual cards.
* My team did not know I designed the system and because of a family obligation I was not there with them. That being said, the system is designed to encourage winning all the time anyways, though in hindsight with knowledge of upsets it may be possible for a team to think that they could have done better by losing a particular match.
* I have not helped with previous HSNCT's, and I had nothing to do with the Sunday card schedule. I don't have any problems with that schedule, but it was a repeat of last year's playoff schedule.
* I had nothing to do with assigning teams to cards. I gave some information about how to keep elite teams and teams from the same state separate for the first several rounds which NAQT used, as evidenced by the fact that the Saturday morning matches had few elite matchups and few intrastate matchups. My idea for seeding the teams from 1-200 was not used, either because of a lack of communication or because NAQT didn't want to do that. I did not find out which teams had which cards until they were posted on the blog.
* Let me give an example by what I mean when I say that the system basically always encourages winning. In our first match, New Trier played Grand Junction. The winner of that match was scheduled to play the winner of a match involving GDS A, and given the skill level of New Trier and Grand Junction, that's a major longshot. As it turned out, New Trier won its first match and then lost its next two to get to 1-2, while Grand Junction recovered from that match to get to 2-1. Here's the thing, though: In its third match, New Trier played the loser of Hopkins vs St Johns first round match, while in its third match, Grand Junction played the winner of Hopkins vs St Johns. By logic, New Trier was given an advantage over Grand Junction because we beat them. In reality, there was an upset or two that led to Grand Junction temporarily having a better record. Also, if we wanted to consider throwing the first match, we would have to consider the chance that we could also lose our second match--given our inconsistency and lack of knowledge of our next opponent, I could not have said with certainty that a first match loss would have lead to a second match win.
Basically, and this is something that Dwight discovered in his last post, what this system does is maximize the number of times that a team coming off a win plays a team coming off a loss. In a tournament with perfect seeding and no upsets, the teams that win their first match are the top 100, and the teams that lose their first match are the bottom 100. The teams that win then lose to get to 1-1 should be ranked 51 to 100, and the teams that lose then win to get to 1-1 should be ranked 101 to 150. Thus, the teams that win first should get to at least 2-1, while the teams that lose first should get to at most 1-2. Due to imperfect seeding and upsets, this happens only approximately. The same type of thing happens in later rounds, though winning records have more incoming teams coming off a win than a loss, so some teams coming off a win play each other, and vice versa for losing records.
Going through the results, I was surprised at how many teams went on streaks. Of course, very top teams go on some winning streaks and very bottom teams go on some losing streaks, but teams near the middle should almost alternate. There are several cases of average teams winning or losing three or four in a row, however, which is not what I would have predicted.
* I thought that my system would lead to fewer cases of 5-5 teams with better stats than 6-4 teams as compared to past HSNCTs. Judging by a quick glance, it did not or perhaps only did so by a small margin.
* Most of the comments above are pretty much on target. One thing to keep in mind is that if you have perfect seeding and no upsets, then any system you use is going to produce great results. Also, if you play 100 rounds, then you will get great results. The test of a system is how well it handles upsets and poor seeding in a timely manner. As I have said before, I think the card system does this better than pools, though that does not mean that any tournament using cards will end up with perfect results. One thing to remember that comparing HSNCT to NSC is apples and oranges for many reasons, including what I sense as better seeding by NSC (which is not saying that NAQT just throws teams together in a horrible fashion but instead saying that PACE does this extremely well), longer matches in the past at NSC (which leads to fewer upsets), and a more academic focus at NSC (ditto).
* Part of the challenge of the HSNCT schedule was preventing teams from traveling between the hotel and convention center without a bye and minimizing the number of double byes. These aspects actually took a lot of my time, though I don't think that detracted from the fairness of the schedule.
* The uneven matches started with 3-0 Bellarmine vs 2-1 LaCrosse Logan and 1-2 Harding vs 0-3 McMinn Central. All other uneven matches can be found in those teams/cards, their opponents, their opponents' opponents, etc. All later matches involving them had a 50/50 shot at being uneven.
* I did a few things to try to lessen repeat matches. Some repeats are inevitable, but if I had somebody with the time/ability to write somewhat sophisticated programs involving spreadsheets working with me, there would have been fewer. I believe that all repeats had at least two matches in between them.
I'll have more to say later.