the return of AHAN wrote:Wait, wait, wait... People seem to think that this set might have been too easy, right? Were people saying the same thing a year ago? I ask because my team powered 153 toss-ups last year in 15 games, and scored 479.2 PP20TH and 24.8 PPB (2nd behind St.John's 25.05). The highest number of powers I see this year is Harmony's 108; the only school to crack 100 powers, and doing so in 16 matches. The highest average I see this year was Kealing A's 435.1. I mean, we couldn't be there this year, so this is supposition on my part, but maybe the issue is there's a bit of 'catching up' happening with the rest of the nationals-level field??
Another variable that (I think) no one has mentioned is the location of power marks in the questions. The same set of tossups, but power marked with a slightly different philosophy or set of criteria, will dramatically affect these statistics.
I don't know if this was intentional, but it seemed to me like the power marking was much less generous in the playoff games than it was in the preliminaries.
ETA: For my team, in 8 preliminary games, in which we played against 5 eventual playoff and 3 non-playoff teams, 68/175 tossups (38.9%) were powered by either team. Median 9.5 and mean 8.5 powers per game.
In 5 playoff games, which theoretically should feature stronger teams which power more questions, 27/109 tossups (24.8%) were powered by either team. Median 5 and mean 5.4 powers per game. Obviously this a small sample size, but at a glance, this seems significant.