When does it start today?

Coaches meeting is at 9:00. Games start at 9:30. I will be keeping the individual statistics and trying to post results on here.

I will be watching some of the early games (more so than I did last year), so I don't know if I will post after each round.

Man these questions blow.

Guess who didn't feel like trudging through the rain and storms this morning...(yes, you're right!)

I think I might head over and try to catch the 11:30 game, though.

Weak, I ran through the rain as my bus pulled up.

I think we should consider a statewide ban on teams spending money for uniforms until they go to more than 5 regular season tournaments a year.

Why would such a ban be needed and what would it accomplish?(a sense of team unity?) Illinois requires team uniforms...

someones being facetious on the internet, time to drop a monocle

Teams should be spending money on more important things like going to more tournaments. And Illinois' rule requiring team uniforms is ridiculously unnecessary.

Sorry... I thought you were being serious. It is nice that MSHSAA has academic competition as its picture on its website for the moment... Ridiculously funny, and totally unneccessary. I agree that they should go to other competitions, but the only thing my school would actually originally pay for was shirts.... We have to raise all of our own money, and in a town of 2000... Academic Competition is rather low, when 1.2 million dollars are spent on football and track, and 3.4 on a new softball-baseball complex. We mean nothing, although we are the only activity besides like FBLA, FFA, and Science Olympiad that actually do well for the school..


<div class="editby">Edited by <a href='http://s4.zetaboards.com/Academic_Competition/profile/3021565/'>knobbie10</a>, May 8 2009, 10:17:53 AM.</div>

Richland wins 280-275.

I wondered how Class 2 ended.
I was pretty satisfied with the Class 1 championship, but then...

In general, though, I must say I don't like the vocabulary questions that give you the letter the answer starts (or ends, or starts and ends) with, and then how many letters the word is, and a definition of the word. The math questions seemed ridiculous too, but then I'm not a math person, I prefer other subjects. I wouldn't be surprised if I came up with some other issues later, but the vocabulary is what sticks out right now.

If anyone wants to play a game of, uh, "pick up quizbowl" during lunch come find me, and we might set something up.

NKC beat FZW in game 1.

Hey, Charlie, Matt, and Jeff - I see you...

Apparently Ladue & NKC went 3-0 to get 1st & 2nd Seeds. FZW went 2-1 (3rd seed), and Truman is 4th seed. (All information provided by Julia, who called me)

Oh, and games started at 9:30 A.M.?

YOUR ARE WRONG!
NKC Lost to Clayton, but were still the 2 seed. Clayton made the 4th spot over Truman.

NKC's playing Ladue for the championship. FZW and Clayton are playing for third.

Ladue is winning by like 100.

NKC's closing the gap some, they're down by like 50 now.

Unfortunately for us, it looks like the best four teams probably made it to the state final four in class 2. The one other team that might be able to lay claim to a top spot in my eyes is Smithton (who lost a 5 pt heartbreaker to St. Paul Lutheran at districts). I would have loved to have a chance against Purdy, but they are a good team and would have probably given us a great match. Too bad we hadn't played better at our home tournament so we could have met them this season.

Congratulations to all who placed and to Richland and St. Paul Lutheran on what appears to have been an awesome game (at least in score)!

Out of curiosity, does anyone know who is participating today for Clayton. I'm curious to see if we beat their top players at NAQT, or if they were missing key members.

Their team is basically the same as at NAQT state.

Ladue won the "championship" 400-235. I hope to see you all at the non-scare quote state championship at Mizzou next March!

Thanks for the info.

Well, I was close. Congrats to Ladue. If nothing else (which is exactly how much "else" there is), it certainly looks good to have an STL team as state champions again.

If anyone could post the results for the final 2 games that would be great!

They're located at the MSHSAA website at http://champs.mshsaa.org/results/box.asp?Box_Score_ID=352.

Also, all MSHSAA State/Sectional results can be found in the QB Wiki at http://www.doc-ent.com/qbwiki/index.php?title=2009_MSHSAA_State_Championship (note--the entire website is strongly anti-MSHSAA)

yeah congrats to Ladue

Not much to discuss about questions...they flat out sucked as expected and equalized the field like good MSHSAA tournaments do. The real winner was QG itself, poviding us with nice low-scoring games (proving defense wins championships?). The lesson here is GO TO NAQT STATE!!!!!!!!!!!!!! As the folks at picnicface say "IT'S REEAAALLLLLLL".

I suppose I'll get the ball rolling on discussion of the "tournament," a term I am regrettably using quite loosely. I'll preface these comments by noting that while they are focused on Class 4, as I was watching their games for most of the day, the premises apply to every class.

This tournament was abominable. Atrocious. Embarrassing. I certainly intend no disrespect to Ladue, who was far and away the best team on these questions and deserved their victory. I also have nothing negative to say about the tournament staff, who were just following the rules with which they were presented; I believe they also looked over the questions beforehand, which I'm sure helped somewhat, as I noted no outright wrong answers. The fault for this disaster lies squarely in two places: the tournament setup, and the questions themselves.

First, I'll remark on the way the MSHSAA system is set up. I don't say this to downgrade the abilities of any team who competed yesterday or today; it's obvious that everyone worked very hard to get to that point, and I didn't see a team that I wouldn't describe as at least "good." However, this tournament in no way represented a field of the best eight teams in each class, and that's not fair. For an organization that spouts so many platitudes about "fair play" and "the spirit of competition," MSHSAA sure doesn't seem to care very much about the fairness of their tournament setup. It is a basic fact of life that the best teams are going to be concentrated in certain areas. If it doesn't bother MSHSAA that they have specifically designed their system in such a way that necessarily is going to leave superior teams at home, that's their prerogative, but they should stop pretending that they're promoting "fair play." This is about as far from "fair" as you can possibly get without showing teams questions beforehand. Also reeking of inequitability is the tournament setup itself. Three preliminary games and a four-team single-elimination bracket is just screaming for something fluky to happen. I don't feel any team was shafted by this today or yesterday, but it's happened before (see: 2004 Class 4) and will happen again. I'll reiterate my call for MSHSAA to switch to a game format that doesn't take an hour per round; it would be quite easy to run an eight-team round robin plus finals in a more manageable format, eliminating any strength-of-schedule issues that have kept so many deserving teams out of the final four. You can't run a round-robin in basketball, but you can in quizbowl; stop treating them like they're the same. They're not.

The biggest issue, however, is of course the questions. I honestly cannot find a word in my vocabulary to describe how bad this question set was. I've been involved in this game for eleven years now, first as a player in junior high and high school, now as a collegiate player and high school tournament director. This was, without a shadow of a doubt, the worst question set I have heard in that entire span. Numerous questions deliberately misled players, purporting to ask for one thing at first and then turning 180 degrees to ask for something else at the end. There was literally one question in this tournament whose first two words were "This author" and went on to ask for the players to identify Night given its original-language title, not even bothering to mention that it was written by Elie Wiesel. My opinion on math is already well-established and I won't dwell on its inclusion any further at this time; I will say though that the calculation questions in this tournament were generally even more horrid than usual, and mostly focused on tricks one would have learned by junior high school. Several questions actually required players to multiply by 3.14! This isn't even remotely high school math! The most widespread problem in this tournament, however, were the sheer number of buzzer races. Probably half of the questions were only one line long, and most of the ones that remained gave three or four lines of rambling, entirely unbuzzable clues before devolving into massive buzzer races when the single tangible clue is finally read. I'm sure Jeff will have more examples, as he took notes. The players on these teams are so good that they're going to be able to associate the vast majority of the answers with at least their easiest clue, and probably more. The problem is that when 90% of the questions have just one clue on which anyone can buzz, what results is all eight players furiously mashing on their buzzers at the exact same time, yet only the one player who had the stroke of good fortune that their signal was recorded a thousandth of a second before the others has an opportunity to answer. You are, in effect, turning our game into nothing more than a coin flip, a game of chance; buzzer speed tests no skill whatsoever, it's just luck of the draw. Why, then, should our state's best and brightest continue to work at this game and learn as much as they can, when their knowledge pool becomes irrelevant in favor of reflexes? When deep knowledge is completely ignored in favor of luck, speed, and the superficial, what the system is doing is actively discouraging the pursuit of knowledge! How can educators in good conscience continue to support it?

I really, really want to be able to support this tournament; I did play in it, after all, and playing in it was the highlight of my high school career. However, after seeing what I saw today, I am forced to conclude that I can not in good conscience continue to do so. I am disappointed beyond words that what is purportedly our state's premier event is decided in this fashion. The tournament was so terrible that any results derived from it are basically meaningless; the setup is poor, the questions are even worse, and the unfortunate result is that this makes it impossible for true skill and deep real-world knowledge for shine through. When one compares this tournament to the NAQT Missouri Qualifier, for example, hilarity would ensue, and I am not just saying this because I directed that tournament. There truly is no comparison between these two events, and that's a shame. If you won't take the word of a former player, maybe you will listen to the legion of current players who I heard joking throughout the day about how laughable it all was. I am more than willing to lend a hand in improving this tournament, but such an improvement is going to require a massive reworking of the entire format. I implore those with authority to take to heart the advice of myself and others who have made our suggestions through email and on this forum; I can assure you we would like nothing more than to see MSHSAA provide a tournament that can be enjoyed by everyone. Unless major changes are made, however, I am sorry to report that such a happy outcome is not possible.

Why don't we just get a Roulette wheel and spin it until there's a champion? That might actually be better. WHEE!!!

Amen.

As the Ben Stein moderator so correctly put:
"At this point, there are no winners."

Congratulations to Ladue, they clearly spent more time playing QG than we did. However, I believe the NAQT state qualifier holds far more legitimacy, and I hope more schools attend it next year, so there will be a state tournament in which all of the best teams are allowed to play.

We've never played QG except at MSHSAA.

I think he meant in practice.

Yeah, my statement still stands...

I don't know what you're talking about, jack, we go to QG tournaments all the time!

What, have you guys been going to QG tournaments without me?

Man, and I love beating my head into the desk because of bad questions!

OK whatever, let's not re-enact the scene from the other board.

Dude I love buzzer racez so muchzors!!!! I mean, if we didn't have QG, we would never be able to beat other teamzzzzzz!

Calm down, the reason that some people question your ability is simply because of the lack of quality tournaments on your resume. There's no real way to compare Ladue to the rest of the state. I think you guys would compare favorably, if.

I'm pretty calm right now. Lack of quality tournaments played this year != we love Questions Galore, which is what Grant implied.

oh right, I forgot that it's now convention to form conclusions based on the absence of evidence.

(in reference to Will's post)

Exactly! Now I think you understand. : D

What I would like to know is how in the world NKC lost to Clayton by 80 points. We played Clayton and for most of the game we were ahead, but they came back in the end. I know the questions were bad (down right terrible in the 3rd morning game) but was the NKC/Clayton game close or was Clayton winning throughout the entire game? I'm just wondering because it was this game in particular that allowed Clayton to leapfrog over Truman into the semifinals (the beating by Ladue didn't help our cause either and I was having a "fit" the enitre time while playing Ladue, which I would like to apologize. Those watching and or playing in that match must know I do not act like that at all whenever we are losing usually).

To answer your question, in our game with NKC, I'm pretty sure we were winning for most of the game.

Come on, Grant, Ladue is simply inherently more talented at the questions featured on Questions Galore than you guys are by no intentional work of their own. Whatever that says about the team notwithstanding, there's no reason to be somewhat bitter about it as you seem to be.

I mean, it's not as if you lost to Fort Zumwalt West--in which case you could be bitter that they trained on QG. Ladue's just inherently better at QG.

Also, it's important to note that Ladue was missing its 3rd highest scorer at the Qualifier. Having Marc would have made them roughly as good as we were, in my mind (I think they would have beaten PCH and possibly us), and since we beat you at the Qualifier, that's enough to put them into the floating pool of top notch teams which we, NKC, Savannah, and PCH were members of at the NAQT Qualifier.


<div class="editby">Edited by <a href='http://s4.zetaboards.com/Academic_Competition/profile/89143/'>Charbroil</a>, May 11 2009, 07:25:28 AM.</div>

I continue to disagree?

Which part do you disagree with? That Ladue is inherently better at QG without practice, or that Ladue could have done as well as PCH at the Qualifier?