The Quizbowl Resource Center

What is your opinion on whether a school who sends multiple teams to a tournament should be obliged to arrange the rosters such that teams A, B and C are in descending order of strength?

Generally, I don't have a problem with schools not conforming to the standard A (strongest) to Z (weakest) as long as they make it known ahead of time and back it up with full rosters. This guarentees that the only real issue I have with it, messing up the seeds, doesn't happen.

That being said I would be mildly annoyed by a school that just inverts their teams (e.g. the full A team playing as D, B as C, C as B, and D as A)

The "hah, our A team isn't actually our A team!" joke isn't funny anymore and people should stop using it. It screws with expectations of lower-skilled / newer teams and can have the potential to screw up seeding as well if you don't tell the host about it. Non-standard team names are OK (i.e. having color designations for your teams instead of letters) but you should probably let the host know ahead of time about these sorts of things, too.

Will Alston is entirely correct. Especially in college, please don't do this. I told people this last year, but if I am going to seed a tournament, I go into that process assuming your A team is the strongest so it really screws up the seeding if you try to mislead. I'm not going to name any specific colleges that have done this in the past, but it's annoying.

That said, team rosters should be sent in before the tournament anyway to make sure names are spelled correctly, etc.

While I don't know why any teams actually want to do this, it only causes problems when rosters aren't used/carefully scrutinized or whatnot and it leads to improper seeding.

However, at the middle school level, I have seen more of a tendency in my area with the 8th graders on A, 7th on B, etc., which can sometimes be a bit of an issue if you have a bunch of really good 6th graders or whatever. Even with rosters, it's a lot harder to seed because of the lack of data. The middle school circuit here in PA is a very new one, and many of the middle schools are unaware of the greater quizbowl world and its standards.

I'm in agreement with all of the above, but particularly so if you are a team that is new to an event or location. It is already difficult enough to seed a large event without adding this to the mix, and it really serves no purpose--indeed, it can give the appearance that you are deliberately trying to game the system for an advantage. I know that when I seed an event, I always seed an A squad over a B squad, and I try to balance the number of A and B squad teams in any given pool where possible.

I literally once saw a school (a very prominent quizbowl school, no less) use the system of "the A team is the first 4 people who signed up, the B team is the next 4 people who signed up, etc" which makes no sense but totally happened.

The solution is to require rosters if you're going to be creating brackets.

For the last 5 or 6 iterations of the Barrington Invitational, I've created "Challenge", "Standard", and "B" pools, and make it abundantly clear to coaches that the 'A' team should be their best team, and can only play in the "Standard" or "Challenge" divisions, while "B" or lower designated teams can play in any of the three. I made an exception once wherein a team of nothing but 4th/5th graders was permitted to play in the "B" bracket, despite being the school's only team. This works well for us. In 2017, it seemed odd, at the time, that a 'B' team won our 'standard' tournament. But when their 'A' team is placing in the top two of the 'Challenge' division, it's hard to accuse them of somehow trying to stack their teams, even when their top 'B' team scorer joins the 'A' team and helps them win MSNCT 2 months later.

Monstruos de Bolsillo wrote:While I don't know why any teams actually want to do this, it only causes problems when rosters aren't used/carefully scrutinized or whatnot and it leads to improper seeding.

Skepticism and Animal Feed wrote:The solution is to require rosters if you're going to be creating brackets.

Not denying that rosters are a good thing to have, but the onus should be on the schools to label their teams appropriately. Don't create extra work for tournament directors! It's silly to make your TDs research everybody's stats to gauge teams' expected strength. The fact that well-established college programs still label their teams seemingly at random is puzzling.

Aaron's Rod wrote:

Monstruos de Bolsillo wrote:While I don't know why any teams actually want to do this, it only causes problems when rosters aren't used/carefully scrutinized or whatnot and it leads to improper seeding.

Skepticism and Animal Feed wrote:The solution is to require rosters if you're going to be creating brackets.

Not denying that rosters are a good thing to have, but the onus should be on the schools to label their teams appropriately. Don't create extra work for tournament directors! It's silly to make your TDs research everybody's stats to gauge teams' expected strength. The fact that well-established college programs still label their teams seemingly at random is puzzling.

stop subtweeting us

Muriel Axon wrote:

Aaron's Rod wrote:

Monstruos de Bolsillo wrote:While I don't know why any teams actually want to do this, it only causes problems when rosters aren't used/carefully scrutinized or whatnot and it leads to improper seeding.

Skepticism and Animal Feed wrote:The solution is to require rosters if you're going to be creating brackets.

Not denying that rosters are a good thing to have, but the onus should be on the schools to label their teams appropriately. Don't create extra work for tournament directors! It's silly to make your TDs research everybody's stats to gauge teams' expected strength. The fact that well-established college programs still label their teams seemingly at random is puzzling.

stop subtweeting us

Sure hope some day that Jason Asher kid will make the Minnesota A team!

Aaron's Rod wrote:
Sure hope some day that Jason Asher kid will make the Minnesota A team!

Hey now, give him some credit. Looks like he just worked up to the B team a few weeks ago!

Minnesota A did beat Minnesota B at acf fall tho...

Hyrdofluoric_Acid wrote:Minnesota A did beat Minnesota B at acf fall tho...

... and lost to Minnesota C. I think we're facing an uphill battle here.