This has actually been done before, in some capacity. For many years, Emporia State hosted their college tournament with a “call-out” system in elims (George RR Pflaum on Tabroom). Unfortunately with the demise of their program, it seems to have fallen into obscurity.
It’s an interesting and fun experiment (I participated in it myself), but I don’t think it resolves your issues about the arbitrariness of speaker points, or brackets, but rather magnifies them. Nor do I think it results in many of the purported benefits.
If a bracket of 32 teams has 10 6-0/5-1 teams and 22 4-2 teams, that still relies on arbitrary seeding because 5 of the 4-2 teams (seeds 11-15, seed 16 would not draft) would have the advantage of drafting their opponents, while the others don’t. Which 4-2s (or the order of 5-1s for that matter) get to choose still rely on the tiebreakers such as speaker points, opponent win rate, etc., but unlike a typical bracket, it weights them more because teams that lucked out are arbitrarily granted more power, and teams that were just close, but not there, have zero power (16th, 17th seed for example).
I also agree with the framing of writing tailored, specific strategies generally being good, but I don’t think this really leads to that.
First, I don’t think it incentivizes top teams writing tailored strategies more than they already would. The top 10 teams are still going to prioritize their prep vs the other top 10 teams, because those are the teams they are likely to debate in either system. But they wouldn’t choose those teams for as long as they can—what’s the point of the top seed choosing another top 10 team in doubles? Clout, sure. But why risk losing in Doubles (in a bid round in HS, or too early to be considered for a First Round in college), when you could choose the worst team in Doubles, Octas, and then start debating the “best” teams in Quarters when you already would’ve started to.
Second, having this power doesn’t mean you could accurately predict who your elim choices will be either, which means the top 10 teams would be better off writing tailored strategies to other top 10 teams, and the lower seeds would never be able to accurately predict a.) if they’re in elims, b.) if they’ll be able to draft teams IF they are in elims, and c.) who their options will be. Meaning, it doesn’t really lead to either subset of teams writing tailored strategies or prep, because it would once again be up to the whims of speaker point / arbitrary seeding.
Third, it doesn’t really increase the quality of debates. Again, top teams choosing worse teams, etc., but that’d be even more true in clash debates—if policy teams despise the K, they’ll avoid those debates. If K teams prefer them, they’d look for the best team to exploit, leading to worse quality debates. For example, a lot of HS debaters are horrible at answering the K, or understanding it. K teams would never choose to debate any policy team that would have a slight advantage in those rounds. They’d always choose the random sophomores who will drop everything on the
flow because they don’t know what’s happening.
It would also be a logistical nightmare for tournaments. Online coin flips and strike cards are a great example—while simple in nature, there are always inevitably problems with teams entering their choices on time. I recently ran a tournament with both, and we had to manually enter strikes for multiple teams due to a missed deadline. Now take those problems to the level of drafting teams—just under half of the teams in elims would have to make sure they went on Tabroom at the right time, and drafted teams in an order they were happy with, all before a pairing could be blasted. Tabroom staff would have to make many, many manual fixes to make sure it’s correct in a world of teams make mistakes or miss the deadline.
Any solution to this would require a decent amount of time dedicated in a schedule per elimination round, adding to the length of already long schedules.
It would also give an unfair advantage once again to the top seeds—in the first elim, the top seed would know exactly who they are debating for longer than their opponents (up to an alarming amount of time given how much is allocated for a drafting period). This becomes even worse in later elims, particularly the first of a morning. The top seed would know they are the top seed, so they have all night to decide, while the team they choose would never know until that morning. While this already happens with current brackets, its at least equalized where both teams get the large amount of prep, because they both know they are debating.
Apologies for the length of this comment, I kept having more and more thoughts as I went along. This is by no means an attempt to say your idea is bad—I quite like it, and am super glad someone is at least trying to come up with a solution.
Hi, I wrote a longer reply, did some homework, and found that reply missing, so for now I will just say: thank you for your thoughts and historical wisdom. I'll give them some time and come back with a longer thought.
I have concerns about how this could effect debaters of racial and gender minorities. The reason is the idea of "Teams have a perceptual understanding of how “truly” good another team is via past results". I know debaters and structural inequalities well enough to know this translates roughly to "teams get picked based on their reps" - we can mention it would be off past records but its really off of their perceived good debate-ability. I believe this could both result in teams avoiding going against K teams which could even leave K teams being pitted against each-other earlier based off not getting chosen (K v K debates don't make as much sense to initiate, and policy debaters are often scared of the K especially antiblackness Kritiks) which is incredibly bad for minorities to be pitted against each other early leaving overall less late elimination rounds. Other possibility is that teams that are perceived as less strong because of being gender minorities or having a gender minority debater would be a more likely first pick by early picking seeds. It should be a rather agreed upon fact that there is a very large "dudebro" culture in debate especially among top debaters in every event and the disparity in wins of gender minorities vs men is glaring. If we are going by the premise that higher seeds are likely stronger debaters, this means stronger debaters get the pick of gender minority debaters first as well as debaters who are men are less likely to pick their friends who are mostly men to go against. This results in gender minorities having strictly harder routes to late elims. You could try and argue that the goal should be for them to win - but how is it fair to risk that gender minority debaters could get picked out to have harder brackets which could only hurt gender minority success more. Not to mention the embarrassment of being picked first likely being relegated to a gender minority only adds to this public perception.
These thoughts are early and scattered but I believe we should make sure we consider minority voices in how we structure tournaments especially given debate being so inaccessible already to minority debaters. It would be really bad if the first teams chosen were teams from urban debate leagues with less resources or teams who are at their first tournaments of the season. While this system leads to better incentives for top seeds possibly, it adds embarrassment and possibly active harm to lower seeds.
“Embarrassment” — losing to a superior team — is an inevitable part of debate, imo. This is a universal quality whether someone debates the K or not. And the debates between marginalized groups and majority groups are also inevitable, too. The question is when they occur, and I doubt this model would meaningfully change that in a way that is more violent. In fact, I think it could meaningfully challenge it IF the underdogs win. Imagine the top policy team thinking they have an easy octas only to lose to the K team THEY chose.
This has actually been done before, in some capacity. For many years, Emporia State hosted their college tournament with a “call-out” system in elims (George RR Pflaum on Tabroom). Unfortunately with the demise of their program, it seems to have fallen into obscurity.
It’s an interesting and fun experiment (I participated in it myself), but I don’t think it resolves your issues about the arbitrariness of speaker points, or brackets, but rather magnifies them. Nor do I think it results in many of the purported benefits.
If a bracket of 32 teams has 10 6-0/5-1 teams and 22 4-2 teams, that still relies on arbitrary seeding because 5 of the 4-2 teams (seeds 11-15, seed 16 would not draft) would have the advantage of drafting their opponents, while the others don’t. Which 4-2s (or the order of 5-1s for that matter) get to choose still rely on the tiebreakers such as speaker points, opponent win rate, etc., but unlike a typical bracket, it weights them more because teams that lucked out are arbitrarily granted more power, and teams that were just close, but not there, have zero power (16th, 17th seed for example).
I also agree with the framing of writing tailored, specific strategies generally being good, but I don’t think this really leads to that.
First, I don’t think it incentivizes top teams writing tailored strategies more than they already would. The top 10 teams are still going to prioritize their prep vs the other top 10 teams, because those are the teams they are likely to debate in either system. But they wouldn’t choose those teams for as long as they can—what’s the point of the top seed choosing another top 10 team in doubles? Clout, sure. But why risk losing in Doubles (in a bid round in HS, or too early to be considered for a First Round in college), when you could choose the worst team in Doubles, Octas, and then start debating the “best” teams in Quarters when you already would’ve started to.
Second, having this power doesn’t mean you could accurately predict who your elim choices will be either, which means the top 10 teams would be better off writing tailored strategies to other top 10 teams, and the lower seeds would never be able to accurately predict a.) if they’re in elims, b.) if they’ll be able to draft teams IF they are in elims, and c.) who their options will be. Meaning, it doesn’t really lead to either subset of teams writing tailored strategies or prep, because it would once again be up to the whims of speaker point / arbitrary seeding.
Third, it doesn’t really increase the quality of debates. Again, top teams choosing worse teams, etc., but that’d be even more true in clash debates—if policy teams despise the K, they’ll avoid those debates. If K teams prefer them, they’d look for the best team to exploit, leading to worse quality debates. For example, a lot of HS debaters are horrible at answering the K, or understanding it. K teams would never choose to debate any policy team that would have a slight advantage in those rounds. They’d always choose the random sophomores who will drop everything on the
flow because they don’t know what’s happening.
It would also be a logistical nightmare for tournaments. Online coin flips and strike cards are a great example—while simple in nature, there are always inevitably problems with teams entering their choices on time. I recently ran a tournament with both, and we had to manually enter strikes for multiple teams due to a missed deadline. Now take those problems to the level of drafting teams—just under half of the teams in elims would have to make sure they went on Tabroom at the right time, and drafted teams in an order they were happy with, all before a pairing could be blasted. Tabroom staff would have to make many, many manual fixes to make sure it’s correct in a world of teams make mistakes or miss the deadline.
Any solution to this would require a decent amount of time dedicated in a schedule per elimination round, adding to the length of already long schedules.
It would also give an unfair advantage once again to the top seeds—in the first elim, the top seed would know exactly who they are debating for longer than their opponents (up to an alarming amount of time given how much is allocated for a drafting period). This becomes even worse in later elims, particularly the first of a morning. The top seed would know they are the top seed, so they have all night to decide, while the team they choose would never know until that morning. While this already happens with current brackets, its at least equalized where both teams get the large amount of prep, because they both know they are debating.
Apologies for the length of this comment, I kept having more and more thoughts as I went along. This is by no means an attempt to say your idea is bad—I quite like it, and am super glad someone is at least trying to come up with a solution.
Hi, I wrote a longer reply, did some homework, and found that reply missing, so for now I will just say: thank you for your thoughts and historical wisdom. I'll give them some time and come back with a longer thought.
I have concerns about how this could effect debaters of racial and gender minorities. The reason is the idea of "Teams have a perceptual understanding of how “truly” good another team is via past results". I know debaters and structural inequalities well enough to know this translates roughly to "teams get picked based on their reps" - we can mention it would be off past records but its really off of their perceived good debate-ability. I believe this could both result in teams avoiding going against K teams which could even leave K teams being pitted against each-other earlier based off not getting chosen (K v K debates don't make as much sense to initiate, and policy debaters are often scared of the K especially antiblackness Kritiks) which is incredibly bad for minorities to be pitted against each other early leaving overall less late elimination rounds. Other possibility is that teams that are perceived as less strong because of being gender minorities or having a gender minority debater would be a more likely first pick by early picking seeds. It should be a rather agreed upon fact that there is a very large "dudebro" culture in debate especially among top debaters in every event and the disparity in wins of gender minorities vs men is glaring. If we are going by the premise that higher seeds are likely stronger debaters, this means stronger debaters get the pick of gender minority debaters first as well as debaters who are men are less likely to pick their friends who are mostly men to go against. This results in gender minorities having strictly harder routes to late elims. You could try and argue that the goal should be for them to win - but how is it fair to risk that gender minority debaters could get picked out to have harder brackets which could only hurt gender minority success more. Not to mention the embarrassment of being picked first likely being relegated to a gender minority only adds to this public perception.
These thoughts are early and scattered but I believe we should make sure we consider minority voices in how we structure tournaments especially given debate being so inaccessible already to minority debaters. It would be really bad if the first teams chosen were teams from urban debate leagues with less resources or teams who are at their first tournaments of the season. While this system leads to better incentives for top seeds possibly, it adds embarrassment and possibly active harm to lower seeds.
“Embarrassment” — losing to a superior team — is an inevitable part of debate, imo. This is a universal quality whether someone debates the K or not. And the debates between marginalized groups and majority groups are also inevitable, too. The question is when they occur, and I doubt this model would meaningfully change that in a way that is more violent. In fact, I think it could meaningfully challenge it IF the underdogs win. Imagine the top policy team thinking they have an easy octas only to lose to the K team THEY chose.