Nerdy tab post: when is a team’s seeding not right?

So the following actually happened at a Vocal Viking tournament. One debater apparently couldn’t debate during round 3^[1]Why? I still don’t know., so the debater’s partner debated “maverick” (in other words, by themself). Speechwire requires that each speaker receives at least 1 speaker point (that way, the program knows you didn’t accidentally forget to enter a value).

So here’s where the nerdiness comes in: this team was going to advance to quarterfinals. All the teams that had a record of 3-1 (3 wins, 1 loss) were going to advance, and this team was 3-1. If I had used the speaker points as they were, they would have been #6. But were they really the 6th best team?

Here’s the question that I posed when it came to that team: how good of a team was this particular team? Going maverick isn’t normal to begin with — but it’s also not normal to only have that happen for one round in a tournament. Normally, a maverick team is maverick for the rest of the tournament or an entire tournament, not just for one round.

I thought about what would happen if this happened in one of my Argumentation and Debate classes. I would probably have taken the average of the other debates if someone was sick and another classmate had to step into the debate. I wouldn’t have penalized the team just because one partner was sick and didn’t inform me.^[2]In pre-pandemic days, that’s what I would have done. Unexcused absences on debate days resulted in 0 speaker points, because it’s hard to make up debates during the course of a semester.

Seeding is supposed to separate teams in such a way that there’s a difference between the top of a bracket and the bottom — in other words, a team that’s 3-1 with 225 points should be better than a team that’s 3-1 with 210 points. Yes, I know that there’s a lot of debate about speaker points — but I’ll save that for future posts. I think that people would generally agree that there is at least some difference between the very top and the very bottom, even if the differences between teams in the middle might be slight (or may even be slightly opposite of what they should be in a perfect world).^[3]I’m aware that different judges use different ranges of speaker points, and there’s speaker point inflation, and we constrict the range of points we do give, and that small differences may not be … Continue reading

So when it comes to this team: were they really the worst team in the bracket? Should the maverick speaker have earned speaker points in each position? I then thought back to when I took Argumentation and Debate with Dr. Richard Paine when there were 7 of us in the class. I had to go maverick the entire semester. As it turned out, Dr. Paine gave me individual speaker points for each position because each speaker has different duties. ^[4] Luckily, I was both 1st and 2nd speaker in the 6-round in class tournament. I lost the final round, but that’s probably because I didn’t use my prep time very well. But that’s another story… . Fortunately, Dr. Paine didn’t make me the worst “team” in speaker points simply because I was by myself.

This was the compromise I came to: the debater who didn’t debate in a round didn’t get those speaker points when it came to ranking the individual speakers, but I did add the number of points earned by the actual speaker to the team’s total when it came to seeding. I was going to have to break brackets anyway if I had used the original results. So the question became: what’s the best way to construct the bracket? I went back to Argumentation and Debate — in that round, the “team” would have earned points for each speaker.

We use speaker points to determine the best speakers, and how we break team ties. And for better or worse, that’s what we now have as tiebreakers when it comes to debate tournaments. ^[5]I noticed that at least a couple of speech tournaments no longer use speaker points to break ties — they use reciprocals or head-to-head competition. But the latter assumes the two speakers … Continue reading I’ll get more into the theory of speaker points in my next post.

There are a lot of arguments to make because tabbing a tournament isn’t strictly science — there’s an art to it. That’s why computers are wonderful (thanks to Dr. Gary Larson, Ben Stewart, and others). But humans still have to make meaning of what the computer says. I do remember one NPDA where the Excel spreadsheet spit out an incorrect result due to a rounding error.^[6] This was an Excel error, not a coding error by Dr. Gary Larson. Fortunately, I caught that error, and the elim rounds progressed normally.

I recognize that many good and trusted tab and tournament directors would not have made the choice I did — after all, Larson himself said that one of the arguments for computers was that it took certain kinds of decisions out of the hands of people who might manipulate the pairings for friends. The reality was that I was 1100 miles away. I don’t know any of the students involved in the decision I made. I just tried to answer a question: what would bring about the pairings that would be most fair to all of the teams in the elimination rounds? If this were a 5 or 6 round tournament, this issue would have become irrelevant, because the speaker points from that round would have dropped out. Most debate tournaments longer than 4 rounds drop the highest and lowest scores and used the scores in the middle. ^[7] For what it’s worth, that’s what diving, gymnastics, and other sports do as well. And if I had simply done that here too, that team would have ended up in the same place they eventually went in the elim bracket.

As it turned out, the only real difference was that the teams that debated in the semis would have debated in the quarters instead. I do think they were under seeded because of a unique situation, one that I hope doesn’t happen again.