NJ State Championship Results

[Great Bustard]

NHBB ran its 2014 New Jersey State Championships at Seton Hall University yesterday. With 54 teams competing, this was our second largest state or regional tournament ever, and our largest so far this year.
High Tech won both the JV (over Wilmington Charter B, 230-210 in the final) and Varsity (over Livingston, in their NHBB debut, 320-250 in the final).
Jack Mehr of St. Joseph won the Varsity Bee 6-3 over Ben Bechtold of Ridgewood.
Mohan Malhotra of Charter won the JV over Jacob Adelhoch of Middletown South - I do not have the score right in front of me, but I think it was 6-3 or 6-2. As Mohan is from is from Delaware, he was the tournament champion, while Jacob took NJ State champion rights as a NJ student.

Thanks to Greg Burton and Seton Hall for hosting this event - any feedback among teams in attendance is appreciated. I think for next year, trying to get rooms closer together might help, although we would still need Jubilee (or a comparable auditorium) for the opening meetings and Bee finals, so I'm not sure how much that could be improved on. Lunch, I felt, went great - both in that Seton Hall subsidized it, and that it was so accessible- that made up for some of the cross-campus walking (although the 5 minutes or so between Jubilee and the other buildings was not all that far). I do think that I should have allowed a bit more time built into the schedule, and perhaps the 32 and 16 team playoffs (which added ~30-35 minutes to the day over a 16/8 variant) was a bit much. On the other hand, it was a way to get teams an additional match, get some newer teams excited about making the playoffs, and a way for a few additional teams to qualify for Nationals by winning a playoff match. If anyone would like to comment on particular on the balance of more or fewer playoff rounds, I'd especially be interested in hearing thoughts there. That said, at Princeton on 2/22, we will definitely do 4 rounds of playoffs, even if we get 80 teams, to keep the logistics a bit easier.

[Northern Central Railway]

I do think that I should have allowed a bit more time built into the schedule, and perhaps the 32 and 16 team playoffs (which added ~30-35 minutes to the day over a 16/8 variant) was a bit much. On the other hand, it was a way to get teams an additional match, get some newer teams excited about making the playoffs, and a way for a few additional teams to qualify for Nationals by winning a playoff match. If anyone would like to comment on particular on the balance of more or fewer playoff rounds, I'd especially be interested in hearing thoughts there. That said, at Princeton on 2/22, we will definitely do 4 rounds of playoffs, even if we get 80 teams, to keep the logistics a bit easier.

Regarding the playoffs, the 16 vs 32 team bracket discussion is kind of a Goldilocks and the Three Bears kind of thing; for this field 32 was too much and 16 would have been too little.

Here's the margin of victory in the Round of 32 games:
1/32: 350
2/31: forfeit
3/30: 320
4/29: forfeit
5/28: 210
6/27: 320
7/26: 330
8/25: 280
9/24: 220
10/23: 210
11/22: 160
12/21: 150
13/20: 60 (upset win by 20 seed)
14/19: forfeit
15/18: 80 (upset win by 18 seed)
16/17: 110

Based on this, what I would suggest is taking 24 teams to the varsity playoffs if the number of teams in the field was within a certain range, with Round 1 being 16v17, 15v18, 14v19, 13v20, 12v21, 11v22, 10v23, and 9v24. Winners of these games would advance to the octofinals. Coupled with a regular 16 team JV bracket starting at the same time, you would only need to have 16 rooms for the totality of the playoffs instead of the 24 which you needed yesterday (which in yesterday's specific instance meant Fahy could have been completely disassembled after Round 5 of the bowl), and the JV would still finish a round earlier than the varsity like it does now. This structure would still let the teams who are capable of winning a playoff game the chance to qualify when perhaps an unfavorable draw meant they didn't get 3 wins in prelims, reduces the number of readers you need for the first playoff round, and allows buzzers to be taken down that much quicker.

[Great Bustard]

Yeah, I think that's a good idea. Part of me wanted to not effectively penalize the better teams by giving them one less match, but on the other hand, I'm not sure that's really important if it's going to be a blowout. They could scrimmage against other top teams, if they'd like to play the packet, I suppose.

[Insolvency law of Canada]

The lunch was probably the best (and cheapest!) one I've ever had at a quizbowl event, so I wholeheartedly support the choice of Seton Hall as the location next year. The only sort of problem was that the snow and rain in the early part of the day made any non-waterproof shoes potentially awkward, but that's not really something that could be avoided.

The 24 team playoff is a great idea. Like Andrew said, it gives the teams with the potential to qualify for nationals the opportunity to do so, while not making the best teams play the worst ones - especially when there are only 36 teams in the tournament. With more teams the 32 team bracket would work, but with only 36 there's teams with 5-0 records playing teams with 0-5 records; no one really gets anything out of it. Having a bye for the top 8 teams, where they can play each other, if informally, is probably more enjoyable than playing the bottom 8. I think a similar system was in place at Ridgewood two years ago, and it worked out fine.

The tournament as a whole went great. The walking wasn't a problem at all, and made for a nice break in the usual custom of sitting all day. The tournament ran well overall, and everyone who's going is looking forwards to Princeton.