From: brooks@ico.isc.com (Chris Brooks)
Subject: Re: Greg's SotG idea
Organization: Interactive Systems Corp., Boulder CO
Date: Thu, 9 Apr 1992 21:40:17 GMT

In article <9204081940.AA08832@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU> ST403070@BROWNVM.BROWN.EDU (Guy Beadie) writes:
>
>  Gregg, I think that that is an EXCELLENT idea.  I love it when teams
>display spirit of the game, and I am a firm believer in the ability of
>a team to display spirit of the game and still be a good, competitive
>game.  Such a team will not perform as well as an equally talented team
>that doesn't abide by spirit of the game, of course, since teams who
>cheat are allowed to get away with it by the rules, but this would be
>an excellent way to start evening the score with those teams who display
>such disgusting behavior as that reported out of UNCW (with the standard
>disclaimer that I did not actually view that game).
>

I think we are combining two distinct issues here: seeding and disciplinary 
actions against those who violate the SOTG.

Seedings:

It strikes me that what we want here is a method for seeding that is
independent of subjective decisions or "manipulation".  I believe that we have
 a problem in that we (as a sport) do not play each other enough to obtain a
"statistically relevant" basis for determining a seeding policy except in
localized pools (eg. NE & West coast college teams).  I don't think that we
can determine seedings between disjoint pools where there are only a few 
common opponents.  Now this isn't to say that Eric's top 20 is bogus.  I think
it is a reasonable attempt to bring order out of chaos, but, I don't think
we should be dogmatic about seedings given this reality.

The SOTG seeding method still posseses the problem of subjectivity.  How does
one measure one teams SOTG against another?  How does one account for 
"aberrations"?  As a final example, how does one resolve bad chemistry between
some teams (skeletons in the closet and such)?  I don't mean this
antagonistically or confrontationally, but, it strikes me that this is kinda
going backward in that we are attempting to measure something fairly abstract
when we should be trying to come up with something a little more substantive.

Exercising a certain amount of common sense when seeding (ie. not putting the
top 'n' teams in the same pool) should be sufficient.  In other words, if the
team is that good, it shouldn't really matter where you're seeded if your
intention is to win.

As far as violations of the SOTG:

I would argue that the onus of the problem lays between the two teams.  If 
there is a consistent modus operandi from a particular team, just stop
inviting them to tourneys.  Or even worse, if it is a particular player,
come up with some kind of disciplinary action.  However, this begs the
question of some form of formal oversight (eg. ref's) present at any game
where this may be a problem so that the accused cannot say that the actions
were taken arbitrarily.

As a result, I think that if two teams know "apriori" that they are going to
have problems, the captains should deal at the captain's meeting the day of the
tourney.  As far as the Stains are concerned, we feel that we have had our
share of ugly games and that it is an unfortunate part of playing this sport.
We make an effort to deal with these problems between the two teams ourselves.

"Captain"
Stains