USC's First Annual Seventh Sign Invitational Tournament
Srinivasamurthy Kasibhotla
USC campus on Friday night, and saturday this weekend. As most invitationals
go, the questions were a mix between CB and ACF, with 7 minute half
timed rounds. The following teams showed up: BYU(2), UC Berkeley(2),
UC, San Diego(1), Fresno State(1). There were also 2 USC teams in the
fray.
In the round robin matches, BYU"A" and Berkeley"A" tied for top spot, with
Berkeley"A" losing to BYU"A", and BYU"A" losing to USC"B". BYU"B" finished
at 3rd, and Berkeley"B" and USC"B" tied for a 4-3 record, but the tie was
broken in favor of Berkeley"B". USC"A" finished with a 2-5 record, and
behind them were Fresno State, and UC, San Diego (but I could be wrong
about the records of the last 3 teams).
The records from round-robin were only used to determine the seedings,
and all 8 teams were then thrown into a single elimination play-offs.
In a strange 1st round play-off, Berkeley"A" was eliminated by Fresno
State, and I hear BYU"A" had their hands full with UC, San Diego.
However, order prevailed in the later rounds, and the finals was
an all-BYU affair, with BYU"A" winning a cliff-hanger.
I will leave it to the visiting teams to comment about the organizational
aspects, and any other relevant subjects. However, while I am not
an official representative of USC College Bowl team, I would still like
to thank all the visiting teams for coming down (or up) to LA at this
time (when every one must be busy with approaching finals week), and
participating in our 1st invitational.
Vasu
Srinivasamurthy Kasibhotla
>USC's First Annual Seventh Sign Invitational Tournament was held on the
>USC campus on Friday night, and saturday this weekend.
I believe the man-in-charge, David Zuckermann, will post a complete
listing of the results, and individual stats, and such soon;
just give him a little time to recover from a week of
sleeplessness :-):)
Vasu
David Dixon
Srinivasamurthy Kasibhotla <kasi...@alnitak.usc.edu> wrote:
>In a strange 1st round play-off, Berkeley"A" was eliminated by Fresno
>State, and I hear BYU"A" had their hands full with UC, San Diego.
>
I'll say it was strange. Granted, Fresno has a decent team, but *still*..
I'm still pretty peeved that I got burned on the question that began, "This has
the units of joules per degree Kelvin.." (BUZZ!) I answered, "Boltzmann's
constant". The real answer was "Entropy". Grrr...
I also made the mistake of not protesting a question that might have decided
the game. The question asked which book the Ten Commandments were in. I
replied "Exodus", and was ruled wrong (the answer given was "Deuteronomy").
I wasn't too sure if it was Exodus or Deuteronomy, so I didn't press the issue.
Then, after I had signed the score sheet, I realized that it's in *both* books.
Grrr...
>I will leave it to the visiting teams to comment about the organizational
>aspects, and any other relevant subjects.
>
In my opinion (which is not a case of sour grapes, believe me), the USC
tournament was the most poorly organized invitational I've been to. The games
were set to begin at 6:00 Friday night. They didn't get underway until nearly
7:30 because, among other things, the first packet *hadn't been printed out
yet*. Another delay occurred before the finals, where the two BYU teams waited
over an hour for the final packet to be spell-checked and printed out.
Most of USC's packets sounded like they were written at 2 AM the night before,
were replete with typos, misleading phrasing, and pure blatant errors
(did you know that "Tilda Swinerton" wrote _Orlando_?)
I think the USC Tournament clearly illustrates the problems you can run into if
you spread responsibilities around to too many people. It was very hard to
determine who was "in charge" and there was a great deal of finger-pointing.
The Tournament Director should run most of the show, including making up the
schedule, editing the questions, communicating with the teams before the
tournament, etc.
>
That said, I still had fun at the tournament. The All-Star Game (using the
"Sex Drugs and Rock & Roll" Packet) was fun, even though it was a bit of a
farce; four of the eight all-stars were from BYU, and a few of them seemed
visibly uncomfortable with the subject matter. It ended up being a mano-a-
mano between me and fellow Berkeley player Rafi Laufer (since we're both
unabashed Trashmasters).
I look forward to USC's next tournament, hoping that they learn their lessons
from this one.
D^2
Berkeley College Bowl Fuehrer
gre...@yvax.byu.edu
they're the only team (at least that I'm aware of) in Southern California with
any commitment to College Bowl in any format, and Southern California is, oddly
enough, one of the last great frontiers of College Bowl. For the game to
really thrive in Utah, we would need just about every college or university in
the state to participate enthusiastically. USC, on the other hand, has
hundreds--maybe even thousands--of colleges and universities within easy
driving distance. It's close enough for us to drive when there's no other way
there. If College Bowl in the western U.S. is ever going to rival the
situation in the east, we need more participation from Southern California and
USC is doing a lot for it.
That being said, I'd have to agree with David Dixon's assessment. For me, the
problems with the tournament were outweighed by the importance of holding it in
the first place. I'm sure next year, with more experience behind them, the
people in charge at USC will be able to run a fine tournament. Having run a
similarly-sized tournament, I'd agree that packet editing is extremely
important but also time consuming. You can't count on your teammates to write
good packets. To comment on another thread, there does need to be one person
in charge of editing them, but there also needs to be more than one person
reviewing them. I edited out a lot of science questions from our tournament
that I though were ridiculously obscure, but I found out later that I was just
ignorant of a lot of science. I'll know better next time.
Better editing (or earlier packet writing) would have taken care of problems
like the few misleading questions (I got burned by a quote from "Invisibile
Man" when I rung in with the title instead of the first line.) Having a good
packet becomes even more important in the playoffs: while the last two rounds
were fine, the first packet of the playoff...let's just say it lent itself to
upsets. Our team barely won our game due to a 10-point protest. The other BYU
team barely won. Berkeley lost, which was fortunate for us, but not for the
tournament as a whole. (BYU vs. BYU matches are becoming progressively less
friendly. I'm glad we won't have another one this year. Taking second is
nice, but I wanted to win.)
The "Sex, Drugs, and Rock and Roll" all star game was, unfortunately, a waste
of time. If you're going to write a theme packet, it has to be written well.
Almanac questions (or their S/D/R&R equivalents) are just not very interesting
regardless of subject matter. And I'd prefer to think of the BYU players'
discomfort as being due not to the subject matter but being stuck with a bad
packet. Theme alone doesn't make a good packet: our reaction to matters sexual
is not "huh, huh huh, huh huh huh..." (Although I did cringe when the semen
bonus came up in the one game that my family has ever seen me play, at least as
much as I cringed when they saw me pick up two -5s or see my team lose.)
One disappointment I had wasn't with USC themselves, but with
other established College Bowl programs that were within easy travelling
distance but chose not to come. In my opinion these schools have as much or
more at stake in the health of College Bowl in the western U.S. than anyone
else and should have been there for this reason if not for any other.
Jennifer Wadsack and Jeff Stewart won't be at nationals this year, so Jordan
won't make it to his third CBI nationals. (They also have a second child now
who will, unlike his older brother, have full eligibility when he enters
kindergarten.) BYU will, however, have it's own contribution to the CB
nationals age debate. You'll have to wait and see on Friday.
Jonathan Green
who had two finals today, has two tomorrow, and doesn't have time to write
things as long as this post. Not that lack of time has mattered much when
we're concerned with college bowl.
David Zuckerman
>In my opinion (which is not a case of sour grapes, believe me), the USC
>tournament was the most poorly organized invitational I've been to. The games
>were set to begin at 6:00 Friday night. They didn't get underway until nearly
>7:30 because, among other things, the first packet *hadn't been printed out
>yet*. Another delay occurred before the finals, where the two BYU teams waited
>over an hour for the final packet to be spell-checked and printed out.
>Most of USC's packets sounded like they were written at 2 AM the night before,
>were replete with typos, misleading phrasing, and pure blatant errors
>(did you know that "Tilda Swinerton" wrote _Orlando_?)
David, I think there are a few points you should be aware of before flaming
our tournament.
1. The USC "A" packet (the first one we played) was not turned in to me
until 2:00 the day of the tournament. The delay in printing out the packet
was caused, in part, because of some last-minute changes in the schedule that
required immediate attention. We had a perfect schedule set for 9 teams
that would have held if not one of the teams decided to back out less than
48 hours before the beginning of the tournament. I have already expressed
my displeasure about having those two packets come it so late.
We scheduled that packet first because, in the past, that team had been
much quicker in writing packets for us.
2. The delay in the finals packet arose because we decided to bend over
backwards for all the participants. We had to write two packets in the last
day and a half -- USD failed to come through with their packet, meaning we
had to act fast, and we also decided, AT THE REQUEST OF THE TEAMS, to play
a quarter final. I got one hour of sleep Friday night trying to make sure
that all of those last-minute obstacles could be cleared.
3. Over 5 of our volunteers decided to flake at the last minute. This
frustrated me to no end. One of our moderators decided to sleep in until
1 PM on Saturday... and since he was only in town that weekend, and he hadn't
told me where he was staying, I had no clue where to find him.
We value your opinion, but I think some of your criticisms may be a bit
over the top. We here at USC refrained from criticizing your tournament
(which, mind you, we could have done... the phrase "poorly organized"
immediately leaps to mind here as well) because we figured there were logical
reasons behind our complaints that didn't warrant a net post.
We apologize for some of those problem packets... I'm sure you know what
it's like to have a slew of packets come in at the last minute. Now we
know what it's like, too. Plus, we faced the wrath of more bizarre
disk errors than I've ever encountered in my life... meaning a lot of my
edits were lost, and some of those blatant errors decided to creep back in.
>I think the USC Tournament clearly illustrates the problems you can run into if
>you spread responsibilities around to too many people. It was very hard to
>determine who was "in charge" and there was a great deal of finger-pointing.
>The Tournament Director should run most of the show, including making up the
>schedule, editing the questions, communicating with the teams before the
>tournament, etc.
We had to split the duties because, frankly, one person could not have
handled what we just went through. I was in charge of most of the external
stuff & tournament planning, while Michelle took care of the actual
operation. Believe me, I could not have accommodated the last minute,
out-of-our-hands changes without having a second person around like
Michelle.
>That said, I still had fun at the tournament.
Thanks. :^)
>The All-Star Game (using the "Sex Drugs and Rock & Roll" Packet) was fun,
>even though it was a bit of a farce; four of the eight all-stars were from
>BYU, and a few of them seemed visibly uncomfortable with the subject matter.
>It ended up being a mano-a-mano between me and fellow Berkeley player Rafi
>Laufer (since we're both unabashed Trashmasters).
That was Michelle Reese's decision. She decided to go for a theme packet
that really wasn't meant to be serious. Actually, we debated about whether
or not we should take one member from each team for the All-Star game, but
Michelle decided against it.
>I look forward to USC's next tournament, hoping that they learn their lessons
>from this one.
We'll be glad to have you. The lesson we learned was that there are some
problems you can't control, and that you deal with them the best you can.
Thank God that last year's NCT didn't have such a high incidence of
random problems.
-David
Outgoing (and Graduating) College Bowl Czar
--
David Zuckerman zuck...@scf.usc.edu Univ of Southern CA
"Time and distance are out of place here" -- R.E.M.