2014 nAC

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2014 nAC

Post by the return of AHAN »

So, are kids from Naperville North and Riverside-Brookfield going to look around and wonder where everyone else is? Or do they understand what they're attending?

http://www.qunlimited.com/chsche14.html
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Re: 2014 nAC

Post by cchiego »

Typical ChipField. No new areas and a lot of reliance on old standbys trapped by educratic politics. The poor state of Arkansas is still enthralled in the bonds of Chipdom. Seems the same for Oklahoma and Nebraska/Colorado.

Yet the administrations of these schools will continue to blindly pay for this garbage. Someone's gotta start telling them that nope, they aren't actually playing the "national championships." They're paying some misguided fool and his happy band of lackeys' allowances to play "Who Wants to Be A Game Show Host?"

The real strange ones here are the number of decent-to-good Alabama teams. Their state competition is now 100% pyramidal and they've never really had success at NAC. Why do they keep going? Is the hope that as the quality of the field diminishes, eventually they'll get their shot at "glory"? Sheesh, who can fathom the ChipBowlian mind.
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Re: 2014 nAC

Post by Rococo A Go Go »

In regards to the Washington field: Is there really a team named Interstate-35, or is this a new special round where :chip: reads teams questions while trying to mow them down with an 18-wheeler?
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Re: 2014 nAC

Post by Important Bird Area »

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Re: 2014 nAC

Post by Joshua Rutsky »

Chris, in re: Alabama teams, I can only say that

a) I have actively discouraged teams from attending this event as much as possible, and pointed out the superior nature of the alternatives,

and b) that location played a big role in some decisions. Some teams just want to go somewhere "fun" and have a vacation with a touch of quizbowl veneer on it.

Altamont has flat refused to attend HSNCT or PACE. Their current coach says he thinks that the QU questions are better and more fun to play, and that he finds the limited pyramidal framework boring. They won't change their direction anytime soon.

Gadsden City attended HSNCT last year, and frankly, I am a little sad they aren't playing at HSNCT this year. They certainly are one of Alabama's best teams, as is Buckhorn. I know that Gadsden City enjoys going to New Orleans--they don't take the idea of the tourney seriously, really--but as they continue to be one of the top state teams, I think the coach will get more backing to make the longer trip to a place like Chicago. For them, getting funding really does have a lot to do with being able to show the principal "hey, we finished xth out of the pack", and they know they're at best mid-pack nationally on an average day. Buckhorn had a very good squad this year, but probably decided they'd rather go to DC than to Chicago, since this may well be the first time they've taken a team to a national tourney. Sand Rock had a down year this year, and probably figured it would be better to play NAC than to spend the money to go to Chicago and go 0 for the day on good questions, assuming they qualified this year.

Monrovia is the only MS team I see on the list at a glance, and they already went to MSNCT. Not sure why they'd bother with ChipBowl except to keep accumulating experience or to get a trip up to Chicago, but that's their call, I guess. There aren't a lot of MS nationals to choose from.

Hope that helps explain.
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Re: 2014 nAC

Post by High Dependency Unit »

Looks like Jesuit won varsity, Booker T Washington won JV, and Paiadeia won middle school for New Orleans.
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Re: 2014 nAC

Post by the return of AHAN »

After that T-12th finish at MSNCT, I'm curious what Paideia and their players think about winning the nAC (well, at least they won New Orleans. They won't know for a few weeks whether they're Chip's national champs, right?). Do they perceive themselves as really stepping up their game? Or did they perceive the field as being weaker?
I vividly recall Eugene Huang, the esteemed coach of Longfellow MS, declaring Kealing as the best team in the nation in 2011, despite his own team's 3rd straight nAC title a few weeks later.
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Re: 2014 nAC

Post by TheBrothersKalamazoo »

Smooth coarea formula wrote:Looks like Jesuit won varsity, Booker T Washington won JV, and Paiadeia won middle school for New Orleans.
Representing my state well I see...

Booker T. Washington, who sells out on the :chip: format (out of the three years I've competed on the circuit here I've only seen them at a pyramidal tournament once), did not even qualify for OSSAA state this year (the state tournament in :chip: format that feeds directly into his tournament). They do seem very content on winning meaningless trophies while trying to ignore the fact that they're becoming less and less relevant...

On the bright side, though, three teams that went to :chip: last year are going/have gone to a pyramidal national tournaments this year (Yukon to PACE, Enid to HSNCT, Chelsea to SSNCT). Chelsea did reasonably well at SSNCT, and hopefully in all of their cases the level of competition and quality of questions they're exposed to inspires them to stick with pyramidal and work to improve. Also, the number of teams that went to a pyramidal national tournament from Oklahoma (7, up from 5 last year) is equal to the number of teams attending :chip: this year (down from 13 a year ago). One can hope that's a sign of progress.
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Re: 2014 nAC

Post by 1992 in spaceflight »

TheBrothersKalamazoo wrote:Also, the number of teams that went to a pyramidal national tournament from Oklahoma (7, up from 5 last year) is equal to the number of teams attending :chip: this year (down from 13 a year ago). One can hope that's a sign of progress.
That's an awesome sign of progress. Hopefully more Oklahoma teams will start making the trek to pyramidal nationals and see that pyramidal is well worth investing time in to getting better at.
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Re: 2014 nAC

Post by Inifinite Jest »

Our state is making a lot of strides, for one hopefully we'll field a NASAT team next year, instead of this NTAE nonsense. It's also cool that we have a nice state like Texas to our south, playing teams in the Dallas metro and at TI has really motivated me to study a lot. I think a lot of the older coaches are starting to become more responsive to pyramidal questions, especially after seeing their teams get crushed by teams who study primarily pyramidal questions.
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Re: 2014 nAC

Post by TheBrothersKalamazoo »

The Two Hearts of Kwasi Boachi wrote:
TheBrothersKalamazoo wrote:Also, the number of teams that went to a pyramidal national tournament from Oklahoma (7, up from 5 last year) is equal to the number of teams attending :chip: this year (down from 13 a year ago). One can hope that's a sign of progress.
That's an awesome sign of progress. Hopefully more Oklahoma teams will start making the trek to pyramidal nationals and see that pyramidal is well worth investing time in to getting better at.
I can speak from personal experience about this part. Last year our team went to PACE (driving each way, which was an experience in itself), which was the first pyramidal national tournament we had ever gone to. While we had been one of the top teams in the state that year, the competition did not hold a candle to what we saw there. It was quite telling when we got put in a prelim bracket with Stevenson and St. John's and got absolutely destroyed and then finished 66th out of 72. That, along with the continued improvement of North and Memorial this year in-state, has inspired everyone on our current the team to find ways to get better and to provide new players with a good outline of how to do the same, with the hope of creating a team that will eventually be perennially successful on a national level. It looks like Yukon had a similar experience at PACE this year to the one we had, so hopefully they come away with similar intentions.

Also, it's actually 8 attending pyramidal nationals this year (forgot about Santa Fe going to HSNCT), so :chip: is outnumbered this year by teams seemingly going pyramidal, which is even better.
Infinite Jest wrote:Our state is making a lot of strides, for one hopefully we'll field a NASAT team next year, instead of this NTAE nonsense. It's also cool that we have a nice state like Texas to our south, playing teams in the Dallas metro and at TI has really motivated me to study a lot. I think a lot of the older coaches are starting to become more responsive to pyramidal questions, especially after seeing their teams get crushed by teams who study primarily pyramidal questions.
It seems like one part of progressing pyramidal further here would be trying to convince OSSAA to sever their direct ties to :chip: , as this would create a situation where teams here don't have the open invitation on official state letterhead (this is speaking from experience, as we got this letter last year when we finished 2nd in OSSAA) letting them know they can attend the nAC. This would not necessarily eliminate the insistence of all hangers-on (e.g. Booker T. Washington and Claremore) and it may be far more difficult than I'm aware of, but it may eliminate part of the problem.

There isn't necessarily a lack of participation here, as OSSAA has somewhere around 150 teams competing every year across all classes for Academic Bowl, and there is certainly some history of pyramidiality being prominent here, as evidenced by OU's relatively high finishes at early iterations of ACF Nationals and the fact that the site of the first ever HSNCT is a 5 minute drive from my house (I don't know what has become of OU's team or the other previous efforts at making pyramidal quiz bowl more prominent here, e.g. the existence of OQBA. Anyone who's been around longer than I have know what became of them?). The pyramidal tournaments here don't have arbitrary restrictions and open discouragement of existing the way Kansas does and Missouri has in the past either, so it seems like it wouldn't be as hard as other places to grow an already existing pyramidal circuit.

Regarding Texas, it is an excellent resource to have. I would have liked to have gone to some of the tournaments down there this year (band conflicted every potential opportunity). Considering that teams in other regions are willing to drive similar distances as what it would be to the DFW area or even central Texas cities to go to tournaments, it seems like it wouldn't be that hard for more teams to go, and it would give the opportunity to compete with some of the best teams in the nation.

Speaking in the current, looking at stats for tournaments this year versus years past the stats from teams at the top level here (and overall, by what I can tell) have increased. We'll probably have a good idea of how much the top competition in the state has improved after the HSNCT this weekend,.

Edit: Less words, more to point.
Last edited by TheBrothersKalamazoo on Tue May 27, 2014 1:04 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: 2014 nAC

Post by quizbowllee »

Joshua Rutsky wrote: Gadsden City attended HSNCT last year, and frankly, I am a little sad they aren't playing at HSNCT this year.
Did they? I don't think they have EVER been to HSNCT.
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Re: 2014 nAC

Post by Important Bird Area »

Gadsden City has indeed never attended HSNCT.
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Re: 2014 nAC

Post by evilmonkey »

I don't want to downplay the increase in Oklahoma schools playing pyramidal tournaments, but the trend of Oklahoma schools not attending pyramidal tournaments is fairly recent. Perhaps this is particularly stuck in my mind as Edmond Memorial defeated my team in my only HSNCT.


Oklahoma HSNCT Attendence, by year:
EDIT: These numbers aren't official: I may be missing a few.

1999: 6 teams (5 schools)
2000: 4 (3)
2001: 3 (3)
2002: 7 (5)
2003: 2 (2)
2004: 5 (5)
2005: 4 (3)
2006: 8 (7)
2007: 7 (7)
2008: 8 (7)
2009: 12 (10)
2010: 4 (4)
2011: 2 (2)
2012: 4 (3)
2013: 2 (2)
2014: 5 (5)

Notably, the number of Oklahoma teams has fallen to two or three schools all 5 times HSNCT has been held in a coastal location; they have had at least four schools competing 9 of the 11 years HSNCT has been held further inland.
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Re: 2014 nAC

Post by Sen. Estes Kefauver (D-TN) »

Does OQBA exist in any form today? I know that Eric Bell quit running it when he moved to Vegas, but remember that there were other people trying to keep it going. There is perhaps a better thread for this, but I actually played an OQBA tournament in 2007 and, for whatever it's strengths were, I felt afterwards that OQBA had the crippling flaw of continuing to operate like it was 2003. All the tournaments were NAQT only (at a point when NAQT was nowhere near as consistently good, and when there were many better written independent sets). The tournament I went to had an arbitrarily assigned 6 game prelim schedule that was neither pools nor Swiss pairing, followed by 3 single elimination games, with an 18 team field where infinitely better options exist. It didn't seem like there was any young blood to step up and really make a drive to modernize, so it devolved into an attempt to form an "NAQT circuit" where teams had poor expectations for tournaments and little incentive to really invest in the circuit, nor especially great guidance if they wanted to get better. When I helped found MOQBA I was very adamant that we use the best scheduling possible, and run tournaments with diverse sources and styles (well, as different as NAQT, HSAPQ, and house writes can be), made sure tournaments used different power and bonus rebound rules, and worked very hard to quickly educate our best coaches about how to run tournaments and get them to care about fixing our circuit, because I felt that these were things that led to OQBA becoming stagnant.

I totally agree that there is no reason Oklahoma couldn't be a perfectly fine state for Quizbowl. At this point, the most important thing you can do is just run as many tournaments on good questions as possible, and try your best to figure out which teams "get it" and have potential and show them how to improve. Also, stop attending bad local style tournaments and start making that opinion known. That was the other fatal flaw of OQBA, they would sometimes just straight up run bad OSSAA Quizbowl tournaments and never made it clear that they were actively opposed to speed check Quizbowl. To contrast, MOQBA has always had an adversarial stance towards MSHSAA. It doesn't have to be hammered into the face of your audience, but at the same time you don't have to hide that you are trying to show others what you believe superior Quizbowl looks like. Right now you don't have any real manpower to convince your state to change, but you certainly have the manpower to run a few good tournaments a year, and that's as good a start as you can ask for. Lay the groundwork and find other people to take up your cause, because there are local teams that do care - Edmond Memorial drove all the way to Vanderbilt when I was in high school, and Edmond Santa Fe traveled routinely into Missouri at one time (before our tournaments were good). Talk to ther coaches, see what you can do to get them on board, and in the meantime, you should totally make the trip to Missouri since we have lots of good tournaments and good teams that are even closer than Texas!
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Re: 2014 nAC

Post by the return of AHAN »

Through Saturday's games, Illinois teams are as follows;
Naperville North Varsity 1-2
Naperville North JV 3-0
Riverside Brookfield JV 1-0
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Re: 2014 nAC

Post by mlaird »

the return of AHAN wrote:Through Saturday's games, Illinois teams are as follows;
Naperville North Varsity 1-2
Naperville North JV 3-0
Riverside Brookfield JV 1-0
Hey now, you're forgetting the commanding 2-4 record of Illinois powerhouse and perennial NAC qualifier Fairfield during the DC Phase!
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Re: 2014 nAC

Post by Matt Weiner »

My source tells me that New Orleans Jesuit won this.

Maybe now that they've picked up a trophy here they can move on and play a real tournament.
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Re: 2014 nAC

Post by Kevin »

I think they just won the New Orleans phase. Then there's some sort of playoff this weekend in Chicago.
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Re: 2014 nAC

Post by Matt Weiner »

It was this past weekend, though you wouldn't know it from the total lack of anyone in actual quizbowl communicating. The official summary is up on the Chip site, confirming my info was correct. This would be a good time to tell Jesuit that there's nothing left to do at the scam tournament and they can make a clean break to real nationals.
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Re: 2014 nAC

Post by jonpin »

The Chicago phase and finals were this past weekend. In proving that Chip can redefine words with the best of them, apparently the 3 site winners engaged in "THE CIRCLE OF DEATH" aka a double elimination bracket wherein NO Jesuit defeated reasonably good Westchester County team Horace Greeley (which finished out of the top 3 in all three NAQT tournaments it played in the area this season) and a resurgent New Jersey team Pingry (8th place at States though with an upset of St. Joseph). I do genuinely wonder how Pingry feels going from 63rd place at NSC to "second-in-the-nation" at :chip: .
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Re: 2014 nAC

Post by the return of AHAN »

jonpin wrote:.... I do genuinely wonder how Pingry feels going from 63rd place at NSC to "second-in-the-nation" at :chip: .
I'm sure the coach praised his/her players for the vast improvement they made over the course of just a few weeks.
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Re: 2014 nAC

Post by the return of AHAN »

Chip's web site wrote: Declaring a National Champion

Atlanta Paideia won New Orleans but did not go undefeated, finishing 8-1. Warren Middle School from New Jersey won DC but did not go undefeated, finishing 7-2. Woodland Junior High from Arkansas suffered an early loss to Monrovia A, 235-305, but they ended up winning Chicago and finishing 8-1. The first consideration in declaring a national champion is number of losses, putting Paideia and Woodland in a tie.

Of the two teams with the best record, 8-1, Woodland was declared national champions after applying a formula based on total points, field size, and total points by playoff opponents. They won the $1,000 prize for their No. 1 finish; Paideia, $600 for No. 2; Warren, $400 for No. 3.
So, number of losses is the first consideration? If a few really good teams show up and beat up on each other, while one site has a weaker field, the best of the weaker field gets the default inside track to the title of "national champions"? How do participants not have a problem with that?
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Re: 2014 nAC

Post by Stained Diviner »

the return of AHAN wrote:How do participants not have a problem with that?
Is their problem supposed to be, "I went to the nAC, and it didn't rightfully determine the national champion"?
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Re: 2014 nAC

Post by the return of AHAN »

Something like that, yes. I mean, I hope there's more to it and I'm missing some critical piece of their formula that definitively shows Woodland is the best, or I'd have a difficult time accepting such a result if I'm Paideia, for example. :oops:
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Re: 2014 nAC

Post by Matt Weiner »

The section on the JV title (in which an undefeated team was relegated to second place based on a paper calculation a week later) shows the formula used there, which differs slightly from the middle school formula. Both of them are just a series of completely arbitrary numbers added together; there obviously is no answer as to why "field size times 10" was chosen over "field size times 5" or any other number, nor why the middle school division uses "total PPG of playoff opponents" as opposed to the JV division using "average PPG of playoff opponents times 2." It's just cargo-culting the concept of a statistical ranking formula by picking numbers at random and doing random operations to them. It reminds me a lot of when I tried to come up with an ultimate stat to rank baseball players at age 9, except, you know, coming from middle-aged adults who have presumably taken math classes and are running a national tournament that charges money.
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Re: 2014 nAC

Post by Ben Dillon »

I must have missed something here. Why are people listing the National Academic Championship with a lower-case N?

If the answer is that it doesn't deserve to be called "National", then I believe the case has been made many times over that all three letters should be lower case :>
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Re: 2014 nAC

Post by wte80 »

Joshua Rutsky wrote:Buckhorn had a very good squad this year, but probably decided they'd rather go to DC than to Chicago, since this may well be the first time they've taken a team to a national tourney.
I'll not speak to why we went where we did and played in the tournament we played in, but I will say that this was to Dr. Dean's knowledge the first Buckhorn team to attend any flavor of national championship, real or supposed. I'll also add that this year's installment didn't seem as bad from my perspective as ChipBowl is generally made out to be, but it was certainly by no means a good tournament.

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