On Team Splitting at National Qualifiers

[jdpasspawn]

Now that the A-Values have been published, I think it is a good time to discuss team splitting in nationals qualification. I think team splitting for national qualifiers should be banned. This is because it goes against the purpose of national qualifiers, which is to find the best teams in the country that could play at nationals. People intentionally weakening their A teams in a way that does little to represent that team’s actual strength and/or nationals lineup seems antithetical to that goal. I should note that this post is not made to call out any particular teams or players. I am sympathetic to the fact that clubs do this so that more of their members can have a cool nationals experience. That being said, these splits deprive more deserving teams of that opportunity. I think the best way to fix this would be some sort of legislation from ACF. One possible solution I have been thinking of is to require that the team you play on for regionals to be the one you play with for nationals. Obviously, exemptions could be granted such as allowing a player who missed regionals for sickness or other reasons to play on a team for nationals. I think the risk of potentially weakening your team for nationals would stop a lot of the team splitting that we see at national qualifying events. I am curious to see what other people think about this, as well as the feasibility of my proposed solution.

[Cheynem]

I'm sympathetic to this, but on the other hand, I'm not sure how you could enforce this, as this is effectively locking in a team's nationals lineup in January or early February. Aside from things like you alluded to such as illness or schedule issues, there's things like SCT Team A and SCT Team B compete (or Regs Team A and Regs Team B compete) and it becomes pretty clear that the best player on Team B would be better for a nationals team than another player on Team A--there was nothing nefarious about this, they just realized this after finally playing enough tournaments together. If I were Team A, I'd be pretty annoyed I couldn't change my lineups before nationals.

There is also the fact that even if top teams *didn't* split, they would still probably qualify teams anyway, and that many of them do split, so they can better review lineups or allow second or third scorers to get more chances leading a team. I am not sure how many of them are specifically splitting to steal tournament bids.

[jdpasspawn]

I'm sympathetic to this, but on the other hand, I'm not sure how you could enforce this, as this is effectively locking in a team's nationals lineup in January or early February. Aside from things like you alluded to such as illness or schedule issues, there's things like SCT Team A and SCT Team B compete (or Regs Team A and Regs Team B compete) and it becomes pretty clear that the best player on Team B would be better for a nationals team than another player on Team A--there was nothing nefarious about this, they just realized this after finally playing enough tournaments together. If I were Team A, I'd be pretty annoyed I couldn't change my lineups before nationals.

This is a good point. I did not mention it in my original post, but I do think natural changes in team composition could be allowed while still prohibiting blatant team splitting. Teams should definitely be given the benefit of the doubt on roster shifts. However, ones in which (not using any specific real-life example here) A) An A team member is moved for someone who is clearly not of the caliber of that team or B) Someone who is very clearly one of the best four players in a club is moved from the A team could be disallowed while still permitting a fairly wide range of roster changes.

There is also the fact that even if top teams *didn't* split, they would still probably qualify teams anyway, and that many of them do split, so they can better review lineups or allow second or third scorers to get more chances leading a team. I am not sure how many of them are specifically splitting to steal tournament bids.

This part I am not as sure about. While this is a legitimate reason for splitting teams, I don’t know if that sort of experimentation needs to be happening at a national qualifying event. There are lots of others events throughout the year where teams could give a player experience in leading a team or becoming the primary scorer without as much at stake.

Whether teams would qualify if they did not team split is obviously an unknowable question. However, I do think there is a high probability in a lot of of these instances that at least one of the teams in the split who did qualify would not have qualified if they did not split (not trying to name specific examples here, but I do think they exist).

[machgielis]

This part I am not as sure about. While this is a legitimate reason for splitting teams, I don’t know if that sort of experimentation needs to be happening at a national qualifying event. There are lots of others events throughout the year where teams could give a player experience in leading a team or becoming the primary scorer without as much at stake.

If you're not sure what your optimal nats roster should be, you probably have two tournaments to experiment on: Penn Bowl and Regionals. N=1 doesn't let you consider any alternatives. (I don't think you can reliably expect a hard open before nats each year.)

[Stinkweed Imp]

I'm pretty strongly opposed to teams splitting at Regionals in order to qualify more teams (or any other reason). ACF Nationals is a highly exclusive tournament for a reason, and for newer programs or players even qualifying for it should be considered a significant accomplishment. An established school's B team qualifying with the help of one of their A team players gives them the experience of attending a national tournament at the expense of potentially depriving a much smaller and less experienced team that worked hard to even be on the bubble. While there are plenty of totally legitimate reasons for rosters to shuffle around before Nationals, Regionals rosters should be a least a good faith approximation of a teams intended nats lineup. The only practical solution that I can think of would be for teams to submit regionals rosters to TDs and/or ACF in advance and explain any obviously strange team compositions. The number of players who could meaningfully affect qualifications by switching teams is small enough that this shouldn't be an overly difficult task.

[ValenciaQBowl]

This is an interesting discussion. In years when I've had deep rosters at Valencia in the community college circuit, I have frequently split my stronger players to ensure the qualification of a B team (and even a C team once) for the CCCT. I've always felt like this is a prerogative of developing a strong roster of players and helping those who have practiced six hours a week a chance to get a trip (usually to Chicago). And when I've done that those B or C team players will get valuable experience for their next season. Those are presumably rationales for university-level teams splitting as well.

At the community college level, players are limited to three years, and I guess I've justified splitting by the rationale that it's not my job to worry about other teams' qualification prospects (though to be fair, I don't think I've ever worried about justifying it before this). If they recruit and coach well and build their program, then they too can maximize their teams' participation in a national tournament.

The thing that I presume makes this more unseemly at the university level is that a lot of the top schools will have players in their 8th-14th year of college competition. I can see losing out on a bid to a team that splits grad students in D1 to get a weaker second team in being demoralizing. While I'm sympathetic to that, part of me still feels like, well, if you want to qualify, you have to work that much harder to beat the splitting team(s) next year.

[theMoMA]

In 2013, I offered some thoughts on how a qualification system might try to prevent team splitting without causing much unnecessary headache. At the time, most people seemed to think it wasn't worth the hassle. Here is an updated, more fully fleshed out version of the proposal for discussion:

(1) If a team qualifies for the national championship at a qualifying tournament, any player who scored at least 40% (arbitrary number; can be changed) of that team's tossup points, or at least 30 points per game (also arbitrary and can be changed), ordinarily must play for that team at the national championship tournament.

Example: Anne (50 PPG), Beth (41 PPG), Casey (26 PPG), and Dylan (10 PPG) are BHSU A at Regionals. Evelyn (70 PPG), Fang (15 PPG), Garry (10 PPG), and Hannibal (5 PPG) play for BHSU B at Regionals. Both teams qualify for Nationals. BHSU A is a national championship contender; BHSU B is a team expected to finish in the middle of the pack at Nationals.

At Nationals, Anne and Beth would be required to play for BHSU A; Evelyn would be required to play for BHSU B. The remaining players could play on either BHSU A or B at Nationals.

Rationale: The players who provide the bulk of qualification scoring would be required to play for the teams they qualified. But schools would still be able to shuffle around supporting players, meaning that schools wouldn't be totally locked into their rosters and could still experiment with lineups in the qualifier tournament. A team's top scorers are mostly foreseeable, but schools with a lot of players often have legitimate uncertainty about which supporting players fit into their most competitive lineups, and such considerations may change from the easier qualifier tournaments to the more rigorous nationals tournaments, as supporting players improve as the year goes on, or as teams consider which players (and corresponding mix of knowledge bases) work best together.

(2) As an exception to the ordinary rule (1), a team may renounce a bid to free up all players on the corresponding roster to play for any team at Nationals. There would be a deadline for this that at least represents a reasonable amount of time for the next-invited team to make travel plans and accommodations.

Example: In the above example, if BHSU wanted its Nationals team to consist of Anne, Beth, Evelyn, and a fourth player, it could simply renounce one of its bids, in which case it could build whatever lineup it wanted with its one bid.

Rationale: Obviously, by renouncing a bid, BHSU is no longer taking advantage of having three strong players by qualifying two teams, so there's no reason to stop BHSU from building any lineup at Nationals.

(3) If the deadline for bid renouncing has passed, a team may only move "locked" players between rosters by applying to the relevant eligibility committee upon exceptional circumstances. The committee will decide, based on the circumstances, whether to grant the request; if the request is granted, the committee can also decide to dissolve a corresponding bid and invite a waitlist team if (1) there is still sufficient time for a team near the top of the waitlist to attend and (2) the bid in question likely would not have been earned without the swapped player.

Rationale: Contingencies happen, and teams shouldn't necessarily be locked into their rosters when circumstances beyond their control disrupt their good-faith plans. But if there's still time to avoid the harm to waitlist teams by dissolving the now-undeserved bids corresponding to exceptional roster changes, that should happen as well.

Example 1: On the eve of Nationals, Casey comes down with an illness and is not able to travel to Nationals. BHSU applies to the eligibility committee for permission to have Evelyn play with BHSU A. The eligibility committee considers that BHSU built its rosters in good faith and faces the unforeseeable circumstance of one of its A-team players becoming unavailable to play on the eve of the tournament, and the exception is granted. Because this is very late contingency, BHSU B remains in the field, even though it is now a three-person team that will probably finish in the bottom bracket. Alternately, if there is a local team near the top of the waitlist, the committee may decide to dissolve BHSU B's bid if the waitlist team is available (and ask BHSU B to staff or serve as alternates on/spectators to BHSU A).

Example 2: Four weeks before Nationals, but after the renouncing deadline, BHSU learns that Beth is required to appear at a research conference on Nationals weekend and cannot play for BHSU A. BHSU applies to the eligibility committee for permission to have Evelyn play with BHSU A. The eligibility committee informs BHSU that it will grant the request but, because Evelyn constituted the bulk of BHSU B's scoring and the team almost certainly would not have qualified without her, and because there's still nearly a month to make arrangements, it will reach out to the teams at the top of the waitlist in order and invite the next team that's able to play Nationals while dissolving BHSU B's bid. BHSU agrees, and this is what happens. Note: in circumstances where a B team is likely to have qualified without the swapped player, the B team should remain in the field. Another note: teams in this circumstance should always be asked if they agree, because a team might make a different decision if, for instance, it has already booked travel for its B team; this might place teams in suboptimal situations, and the eligibility committee could certainly consider factors such as "already booked travel" when it considers whether to dissolve a bid or not.

Example 3: Four weeks before Nationals, but after the renouncing deadline, BHSU informs the committee that Casey will miss Nationals for a family trip and requests to swap Evelyn onto the A team. The committee learns that Casey knew the trip was a possibility before the deadline passed but wasn't sure of the date. The committee decides that it will allow the swap only if BHSU dissolves its B-team bid; BHSU decides to swap in a non-locked player instead.

I think these rules would probably eliminate most team-splitting for the purpose of achieving bids that a school would likely not otherwise qualify for, while also allowing teams to experiment with the supporting players on their rosters. Teams would also be able to split their strongest players however they'd like at the qualifier as long as they were prepared to renounce the extra bids that resulted.

[ryanrosenberg]

I like this proposal a lot; it should prevent teams from using a couple of strong players to nab extra bid(s) while still allowing actual roster experimentation.

[benchapman]

I very much disagree with Andrew's proposal for several reasons:

1. One of the underlying assumptions is that it's only "supporting players" who are getting moved around. However, this proposal fails to consider that there are many scenarios where someone can serve as an anchor for the B team but would be a supporting player on A, due to the increased strength of their teammates. In fact, I would expect a decent number of supporting players on contending teams could put up 50 PPG at Regionals on a weaker team. Top scorers on contending teams are very good at quizbowl and can shadow strong players a lot.

2. While I won't get into the weeds of the merits of packet sub, the fact that Regionals is a packet sub tournament means that teams have to at least set part of their roster by October in order to finish their packets in a timely manner. If a club has a bunch of conceivable rosters for A, October (before basically every regular season tournament) is quite early to start forcing teams to pick an arrangement of players.

3. I very strongly object to the "committee" being able to dissolve bids, especially at such a late stage. This proposal fails to consider that players are often spending hundreds of their own dollars on non-refundable registration fees, lodging, and flights. It is disrespectful to tell Fang, Garry, and Hannibal that their bid to play nationals has been revoked at the eleventh hour since one of their teammates is doing the right thing by not showing up to a tournament ill. Maybe other universities get everything comped and so it's not as much of an issue for them, but we (U of T) have gotten $1000 in university funding total over the past few years and most of the nationals cost is borne by players. I would have been livid if I had been forced to not play ICT last year in favour of Chicago D (not to call out Chicago, just an example of a potential nearby D1 standby team) since all of my teammates had their flights cancelled.

4. Building off my previous point, I also object to valuing players by their PPG while deciding if they're "worthy" to attend nationals. The message this proposal sends is "you are not really worth anything as a supporting player, we'll only let you stick around if your main scorer is also there". This is a very demeaning message for a quizbowl governing body to be telling players. In my view, it misses the point of quizbowl being a team game. The idea is that you go out there, try to get as many tossups as you can together, and collaborate on bonuses to answer them together in order to win a game, rather than just focusing on maximizing one's personal PPG to be seen as a sufficient contributor by the committee.

[The King's Flight to the Scots]

So, the issue we have to confront is that team-splitting is seriously compromising the qualifier tournaments. For SCT, of the top 8 teams in this list, 4 split their rosters and 2 had players on the editing team; for Regionals, those numbers were 3 and 2, with 2 other teams missing key contributors. The net result is that only 2 of the best 8 teams fielded their real lineups for SCT, only 1 did so for ACF Regionals, and none of the top 4 teams played either. Obviously, team-splitting is only the largest of several factors contributing to this outcome; the total effect, though, is that Regs and SCT really can't serve their functions as regional championships or as national qualifiers. On top of taking bids away from deserving teams and disrupting the rhythm of the college season, the team-splitting phenomenon will make it difficult to seed the national tournaments, since it's virtually impossible to compare the best teams in the country this year.

With that in mind, I like the outline of Andrew's proposal a lot. The most important aspect of it is the 40% cutoff for being allowed to move between teams; most of Ben's issues are with other aspects of the proposal (like the committee), but the cutoff can be implemented without those specific arrangements. It eliminates the incentive to split to qualify more teams while allowing for roster flexibility where circumstances are uncertain. I would probably lean towards having a more objective standard rather than a committee. The objective standard, though, while allowing for specific extenuating circumstances (like tournaments that need teams to split to have viable fields), would necessarily have to be stricter.

I do agree that the packet submission concern for Regionals has a lot of merit. ACF would certainly have to reconcile any change in qualification procedures with its packet sub policies; for NAQT, though, I will note that this won't be an issue.

[ryanrosenberg]

I compiled a list of people who scored more than 30 PPG or 40% of the points for a nationals-qualifying team, then played Nationals or ICT on a different team.

A little under half of these are imo very clear instances of team-splitting to qualify a second team, where the A team at the qualifier has fewer than four people or has significantly lower-scoring players than the top B team players.

From looking at this, I think it would be more appropriate to set the bar for being "locked" to a team at 40 PPG as that still would catch all of the obvious historical team-splits and wouldn't limit teams like Chicago and Berkeley and Columbia of years past that had very strong B teams.

[theMoMA]

To Ben's objections, it's just about always to the benefit of players who don't meet the locking threshold that they don't. I think it's pretty imperative that teams be allowed to shift their rosters because of late contingencies, and perhaps some of the examples I offered are not the best ways for an eligibility committee to handle the described scenarios, but I also think it's pretty important that teams not be allowed to shift their rosters around to create B/C/D-team rosters that would obviously not have qualified when that can be avoided (for instance, when there's still enough time before the tournament to invite one of the next waitlist teams). I think any decisionmaking body in that scenario would have to make equitable rather than rules-based decisions, trying to figure out what is fairest to all teams on the whole given the unique circumstances presented in each (hopefully rare) case. But I think it's important that teams have a chance to make these roster changes based on contingent circumstances, even if there are consequences for doing so.

The objection I don't really understand is the final one; a roster like the hypothetical BHSU B would obviously not have qualified for the championship event without its top scorer, and I don't think it demeans the remaining players to be able to take that into account when determining an equitable solution. If a swap would result in a roster that obviously would not have independently qualified, and the committee decides that it will only allow the swap if the B-team bid is dissolved, it would ultimately be up to the school's team as a whole whether it would make the swap and dissolve the B team's bid or put a different, non-locked player on the A team to replace the player who cannot attend. I would not envision a committee forcing a school to dissolve its B-team bid, but rather presenting that as the consequence for choosing to swap a locked player, which the school is not forced to do, and leaving the ultimate decision to the school's discretion.

The whole point of the procedure is to avoid the scenario, when possible, of schools splitting their strong players to earn bids to national championships they would not have earned if the strong players played on the actual championship roster. If that's the goal, I don't think it's good to create a side door for teams that would not have otherwise qualified to play.

[Gene Harrogate]

What's striking to me in the discussion of this post here and on discord is that there doesn't even seem to be a widespread norm against splitting teams for extra qualifications at the moment. Jack, Vivian, and Matt have all put forward very good arguments as to why it's against the spirit of the game; a less dramatic first step than some of the above proposals might be simply getting everyone else on the same page. With every Regionals, ACF could announce something to the effect that schools must make an earnest effort to qualify with the teams they intend to send to Nationals. If the logistics email had some spiel about the purpose of qualifiers and what is and isn't fair practice, I like to think most teams would comply. ACF could even reserve some scary-but-hardly-ever-used right to annul bids for teams that make obvious and egregious attempts to game the system. If teams continue to flaunt that norm, then it might be time for stricter rules, like the ones Andrew proposes above.

[zbennyy]

ACF could even reserve some scary-but-hardly-ever-used right to annul bids for teams that make obvious and egregious attempts to game the system.

This feels like the ideal type of rule to have to me. The fact remains that there are a ton of valid reasons for needing to rearrange players between Regionals and Nationals, and it seems almost impossible to legislate for all of them. As such, any hard rule that gets implemented in an effort to prevent team splitting would necessarily give teams the right to apply for exceptions, and I suspect that a vast majority of those exceptions would be granted. Which to me, is actually a fine outcome, but creates a lot of red tape and has the potential to punish teams that would be fine, but don't know or don't want to speak up.

All of which is to say - I think the best possible outcome here is that ACF gives itself the power to annul B-team and C-team bids that were obviously earned in bad faith, but rarely ever exercises that power. That can achieved by adopting a rule such as the one Andrew has proposed and requiring teams to ask for exceptions, or by simply adding a policy to the qualification rules that ACF reserves the right to annul the bids of teams whose spots in the field wouldn't be merited with their prospective team compositions. Either one would, in my opinion, have the affect that Henry mentions of bringing everyone in line regarding team splitting and (hopefully) solve the problem by preventing it altogether.

[RexSueciae]

I've no horse in this race but I am skeptical of any attempt to codify a team-splitting ban, whether by statistical methods or by formation of some body that would adjudicate matters of team lineups. I have a deep mistrust of statistics, which admittedly informs my decisions, but I would like to add my voice to the note that raw PPG is not a good way to create presumptive rosters for nationals teams. It has already been mentioned that players might be more suited for one team or another based on their category strengths, the fact that teammates sometimes shadow each other's abilities, the effect that playing with strong teammates might have on PPG, and so forth. There are other factors: a player may suddenly increase in ability (due to learning things very quickly) or decrease in ability (their entire family died in a fire and their partner cheated on them with their best friend). A team might discover that certain players simply have incompatible playing styles, that they buzz too recklessly or not recklessly enough, and seek to rearrange things that way. Hell, two players might get into a massive fight the day after Regs and refuse to be on the same team, but both be stubborn enough to still play quizbowl.

But these, you might say, are exactly the edge cases that ACF or NAQT would ponder in their wisdom and for which they would surely grant an exception. Which leads me to two points against any sort of eligiblity committee or quizbowl authority to override a school's chosen rosters.

I.

The first point is the matter of good faith. Teams, right now, have the absolute right to arrange their rosters however they want at national qualifiers and at national tournaments. It's not been explicitly stated but there's the implication, at least, that right now some teams are not acting in good faith -- that by their actions, they are "cheating" other, more deserving teams out of a spot at nationals.[1] To solve this, we'll transfer some of this power to some duly constituted authority -- a committee at ACF and/or NAQT.[2] And this committee would always act in good faith and never, ever abuse their power.

I have the utmost respect for ACF and NAQT, and for its members as currently constituted, and for the current leadership of most quizbowl organizations. I have only secondhand accounts of ancient quizbowl feuds, plus things I've read on the forums and on the qbwiki. I'm well aware that in the past, there have been some quizbowl leaders who have done bad things. I'm not talking about illegality,[3] but of partiality. Sometimes, a quizbowl group has the misfortune of allowing a megalomaniacal tyrant into a leadership position, where they can do lots of damage. I think it's more likely, though, that a member of ACF, or an employee at NAQT, might use their position in order to try and benefit a particular team. It has happened before.

We're to take it on principle, then, that teams are not responsible enough to govern themselves, but that a duly selected committee would be much more virtuous and not be tempted to sin.

II.

The second point is that of competence. I think it's uncontroversial to state that the best authorities on a school's optimal team rosters are, in fact, the players for that school. They attend tournaments together, they practice together, they know that Vladimir has sworn he's gonna learn science so it's a good bet to move him from one team to another, or that Estragon has been negging a lot more and his sojourn on A team will come to a close.

I don't think it's a good idea to let ACF or NAQT or anyone else to have any but the vaguest possible influence on team composition. Yeah, it's difficult for them to seed nationals, especially when "team splitting" is a thing, so...what? Abolish an ancient prerogative of quizbowl teams for the sake of administrative convenience, like the Emperor Constantine casually revoking the movement rights of the coloni in 332 CE in order to make it easier to tax them? I'm not saying that we're creating quizbowl serfs here, I'm making an extravagant rhetorical point out of sheer devilment.

But a team might genuinely show up to Regs, have one heck of a day, and realize that some assumptions they'd made didn't pan out, and so they shake up their roster at Nats. A team might have players who are skilled but fairly new to the college game, and so outsiders might misjudge their appearance at SCT compared to their later experiences at ICT. A team might even argue something like "look, we're in a circuit that's teetering on the edge of dormancy, it's altruistic for us to team-split so this site has a more balanced field." I don't know. The point is I don't know. And I don't think any authoritative body would know, either. We expect a lot out of national tournament organizers, so now on top of their existing responsibilities we're expecting them to also review team rosters and not make any mistakes?

If any quizbowl organization that hosts national tournaments sets itself on the quixotic spectacle of stopping team-splitting, I would suggest -- and again I'm writing this not because I have an interest in any side, but because I like posting -- that whatever body with the power to countermand a team's own roster decisions be as large as possible, and require a unanimous vote. That, for example, all of ACF's active members[4] need to agree if a team is to be told, officially, to cut the bullshit. And I think it goes without saying that I think that, instead of having any sort of criteria to "lock in" a Nats lineup before Regs with exemptions only infrequently granted, that a team's choice should be the default, and changes are to be enforced only if it's manifestly apparent to the community that the situation is unfair. Otherwise, if a quizbowl club thinks they genuinely have the depth to split their teams and not mess it all up, let them take that chance. Maybe they miscalculated and neither of their teams has the strength to qualify. How much actual, documented harm is it really doing to anyone right now?

------------
Footnotes
[1] I'm still not convinced this is actually happening in a way that matters.
[2] And, presumably, PACE at the high school level, and IQBT, and IAC / NHBB, et cetera.
[3] The only quizbowl people to have done prison time did so for cases of misconduct completely unrelated to their ability to be fair in quizbowl matters.
[4] I know that NAQT also has "members" but I think the positions are distinct enough that I'm not sure if they're an exact equivalent. You get my gist, anyhow.

[Adventure Temple Trail]

Given that much of the discourse (whether it admits as much or not) is targeted at the school I attend, and at me specifically, it seems only fair that I weigh in.

I will give some modest defenses of team-splitting in general, which have been lacking in this thread thus far:

• There are cases where some team splitting is helpful or even necessary to create a viable field. E.g. a region has three full-strength Division I teams and needs a fourth for DI SCT to run. (Like the NorCal site of this year's SCT?)
• Generally, at the top of the field, a split team is easier to upset/win a game against than an un-split team. It makes for more plausibly competitive games, not fewer. It surprises me that people strongly prefer a near-guarantee to lose massively to one full-strength team over a chance to upset multiple lesser-strength teams.
  • For players on very good / title-contender teams, splitting can make the experience of a regular tournament more enjoyable and worthwhile, in part due to the above, and in part because it gets people out of the "shadow effect" from their typical arrangement. A strong enough crackdown might lead to some such players just sitting out.
• I’d like a better sense of which teams have been concretely harmed by team-splitting. (If there are many, I’ll revise in a more anti-splitting direction.) In the cases Ryan found, who were the best teams that didn't get to go to nationals? Did the players on those teams stay interested in quizbowl, or qualify in later years?

A bit more about my decisions and motivations in/around Regionals and SCT this year, insofar as those are the “actual” issue:

• I chose to play Regionals solo precisely because playing the full A team in 2023 at Regionals (and SCT) seemed to be non-competitive and unfun for almost all involved. I anticipated that by playing separately, games involving me xor the rest of last year’s A team would be closer and more competitive for teams like Illinois A, Indiana, and Purdue A.
• I decided to write for SCT for similar reasons; I also thought it’d better serve the community (and my improvement as a player) if I worked to make the set as good as can be. My original hope was to set-edit, but since an editing team was already selected from more regular NAQT contributors, I instead served as a “high volume writer”. I produced 198 questions at DI difficulty this competition year; of those, 139 made this year's set, 120 of which were downconverted to DII. I’m extra glad I did this, because I also had a midterm exam on the day of the tournament (yes, a Saturday), which would have taken me out anyway. I am heartened that this year’s SCT has been very well-received compared to others in recent years.
• I don’t think Chicago actually split its teams at SCT at all, given that I wasn’t there. Note that Adam, Ned, and Claire, who played Nats together last year, were on the same team again; Henry is good at pop culture, which makes him a good fit for fourth at SCT.
  • NAQT saw fit to give Chicago an autobid for my guest contributions. This is consistent with their practice for similar “guest editors” of the past 15 years, and with the general concept of editor autobids also used for Regs. To my recollection, all past NAQT "guest editors" were on competitive teams that could qualify without the “guest”. I don’t have the full list, but it includes Seth Teitler (guest-edited in 2009-10) (won ICT both those years), John Lawrence (2013 and 2015) (won ICT with Chicago in 2016), Matt Bollinger (2015) (won ICT that year and in two prior), Stephen Eltinge (2017) (won ICT in 2018 and 2019) and the top scorer from Yale in the late 2010s (likewise).
  • If this seems unfair and/or it makes sense to dissolve the guest contributor autobid if the school’s team qualifies “for real,” I understand and would ultimately be fine with it.
  • I’d also be okay with making the “guest”-recruitment process more transparent and openly advertised than it’s been.
  • But these are different questions from the team-splitting question.

Where do I stand? Tl;dr: I’d be fine with a workable rule that dissolves the “extra” bid for schools that “egregiously” split their best team(s) at SCT and/or Regionals. (This could also apply to dissolving the “extra” bid from hosting and/or editing.) I leave it to the community to work out exact details.

I would categorically, vehemently oppose any rule that requires everybody on the prospective nationals lineup to play for that letter at SCT/Regs, or that bars people who sit out SCT/Regs from playing ICT/Nats.

To be more concrete about myself, all of the following seem like reasonable options I’d be fine with being confined to (in each, feel free to sub in A Matt Jackson Type, Some Contender School, and SCT/ICT):

• “Matt” plays Regs with full “Chicago A,” qualifies for Nats, and plays Nats together with them (modulo potential changes to third or fourth scorer)
• “Matt” sits out Regs entirely; the rest of “Chicago A” has to qualify for Nats without him. He joins them to play Nats if they qualify, and cries himself to sleep if they fail to do so.
• “Matt” plays on “Chicago ‘A’” while others on the prospective Nats “A” team play as “Chicago B”. If both teams qualify and four people across those teams choose to play Nats together, and any remaining players across “A” and “B” don’t appear to have what it takes to qualify if pooled, dissolve the second bid. (Some version of the Andrew Hart proposal.)
  • A more extreme version of this could involve 3 or even 4 team-split teams being collapsed down to 1-2 bids

Any of the following would be extremely unacceptable:

• “Matt” sits out Regs entirely, expects the rest of his team to qualify for Nats without him. If they do, he is barred from rejoining them to play Nats since he sat out Regs. (If this were implemented in 2022 and 2023, it would have denied Matt Bollinger a chance to contend for the Nationals titles he won in those years. Which would have been Bad.)
• “Matt” plays Regs separate from the rest of “Chicago A”, and both teams qualify. The teams are forbidden from reorganizing at Nats, must play more or less the separate lineups under which they qualified. (Hard to enforce, punishes good-faith roster changes, unexpected illness taking someone out, etc.)

Random last point: is the "harm" to the specific regional site where the splitting team is playing, such that a replacement for the dissolved bid should be awarded to the next team down the order of finish at the same regional site? Or to the next team down on the invite list nationally, across all sites?

[theMoMA]

I want to reiterate, because I don't think people have noticed this feature of the initial proposal, that I suggested that a team be able to split however it wants at the qualifying tournament and, without any intervention from any outside body, decide to renounce one of the resulting bids and place the players from the renounced bid onto any other qualified roster.

So if Chicago A (at the qualifier) were Matt alone and Chicago B (at the qualifier) were "the rest of Chicago A plus a fourth," and the team wanted to place three players plus Matt on Chicago A (at the championship), they'd just have to renounce one of the two bids, and then either Matt (as the lone player on A) or the four players on Chicago B would be free to move between rosters. (Note that most of these players would already be free to move, because the locking mechanism only applies to the players that contributed the most to the qualification through their scoring.)

This wouldn't affect any of the team's other bids. So, for instance, if the "real Chicago B" played as "Chicago C" and independently qualified, while the "real Chicago C" played as "Chicago D" and did not qualify, Chicago would retain the "real Chicago B" bid regardless of whether it renounced the A and/or B bid.

The features regarding committees and equitable remedies and whatnot only come in when a team has not renounced its second bid by the deadline to do so, presumably because they anticipated having a certain roster configuration but then a contingency arose and suggested a different division, in which case there should be a range of options about what to do because the "leftover" team might be very weak, players may have booked travel, it might be too late to invite certain waitlist teams, etc., and there aren't hard-and-fast rules that can govern each situation, so judgment should (in my opinion) be applied to come to the best resolution, given all the circumstances at play.

[joshxu]

Chipping in a few thoughts as a player on a team that might be impacted by this issue. Being on the bubble, outside-looking-in for D1 ICT qualification right now, I can scroll up the D-value list and identify at least one, maybe two instances of team splitting that has resulted in multiple bids. When all bids are accepted/declined and additional bids issued, this could very well be the difference between UCLA being the last team in versus the first team out. I would consider qualifying for D1 ICT—even if we'd surely finish at the bottom of the bottom bracket—to be a significant accomplishment for me and my team. Yet somewhat surprisingly to even myself, I don't find myself particularly annoyed by team splitting. Part of this may be because I'm sympathetic to the practice—it's a maneuver I've benefited from in my high school career, for every reason Matt Jackson has listed above. However, I am pretty annoyed about Chicago receiving an editing autobid when they qualified not just one, but two teams off of D-value. I would also be pretty annoyed if a team behind us in D-value that played at full strength qualified ahead of us from a hosting autobid; I don't believe this will happen this year, but it's happened before with a couple teams in D2 last year, and may happen again in D2 this year.

What accounts for this difference—why I'm annoyed about the autobids and not the split-team bids—is probably that I respect teams that perform well in actual quiz bowl gameplay. Qualifying for nationals is an extraordinary quiz bowl feat after all, so I find it harder to take issue with rewarding teams that achieve this standard, regardless of any roster shenanigans. But for teams to qualify for nationals based on factors other than quiz bowl gameplay—and moreover, to take spots away from well performing teams on actual quiz bowl gameplay—feels much more objectionable to me. I don't disagree with the theory behind editing and hosting autobids—teams that would otherwise qualify may be unable to if their top players can't play. But applying them where this is clearly not the case seems to me to defeat the purpose of the autobid.

[theMoMA]

I can't speak for the entire community, obviously, but I've always thought of part of the rationale for host bids as a reward for the community service of hosting the qualifier tournaments (in addition to the fact that many of the teams would have an obvious or at least reasonable shot of qualifying at another site if they didn't host). That said, team splitting and host bids are separate issues (in that addressing one does not necessarily require addressing the other), so it may be best to start a new thread if you want to generate some discussion of the rationale for host-bid policies.

[ryanrosenberg]

I'll note that ACF does only award hosting and editing bids if ACF determines that the bid roster would have a reasonable chance of qualifying for Nationals if they played. I'm not sure if NAQT has an equivalent policy, but it does seem evident that Matt J would have qualified if he had played SCT instead of writing ~25% of the set.