2013-14 Second Round Bids

Earlier I looked at what the ratings ballot would have looked like for 2013-14 first round at-large applicants.  The ratings produced a ballot very close to the consensus of the voters.  This time I want to look at how it would have ranked the second round applicants.

As an initial impression, I figured that there's a possibility that the first rounds would be easier for the ratings because those at the top achieve greater differentiation since they tend to debate each other more due to elims, round robins, and how power matching produces something like a normal distribution of records.  Once you get further down in the ratings, teams start to get more clustered.  Here is a histogram of the adjusted weighted ratings distribution for the regular season last year.

As you can see, the frequency starts to go up pretty substantially around 1500 until it peeks around 1200.  With the exception of a few outliers at the top, the range of the majority of the second round applicants was between 1500 and 1200.  The mean and median of the second round applicants was right around 1400.  On the whole, there are about 100 team with ratings above 1400, 170 teams above 1300, and 230 teams above 1200 (keep in mind these numbers include a lot of repeats because of mixed partnerships).

So how would the ballots produced by the ratings compare to the actual votes?  Here's the table:

Team	Voters	Weighted	Unweighted
Harvard HX	1	1	1
Michigan State BS	2	3	3
Wayne State LM	3	2	2
Wake DL	4	6	5
Northwestern OS	5	4	4
Oklahoma BC	6	11	11
Missouri State BR	7	5	6
UMKC AF	8	7	7
Concordia College BS	9	13	13
Emory DK	10	9	10
Georgetown BL	11	8	8
Georgetown KU	12	10	12
Texas KS	13	12	9
Cal-Berkeley EM	14	27	27
Emory KL	15	15	15
Arizona State CR	16	22	18
Kentucky GV	17	17	20
Georgia State FF	18	23	22
Kansas State KM	19	14	14
Rutgers-Newark HS	20	20	23
UT-Dallas LO	21	19	17
Trinity VY	22	25	25
Georgia BF	23	18	19
Gonzaga BJ	24	34	35
George Washington SN	25	28	28
Baylor BE	26	16	16
Cal State-Fullerton BS	27	21	24
UT-San Antonio CR	28	24	21
Northern Iowa SS	29	26	26
Georgia State NS	30	30	30
Wichita State MO	31	29	29
KCKCC FG	32	31	31
Gonzaga SN	33	33	34
Vanderbilt BM	34	36	36
Cornell PH	35	35	33
Indiana PS	36	32	32

The ratings ended up fairly well resembling the consensus of the voters.  The average difference between the voters and both sets of ratings was about 3.1 spots.  By contrast, the average deviation of each voter from the aggregate vote was about 3.3 spots.  The weighted ratings chose 14 of the same teams as the voters while the unweighted ratings chose 13.  Things get a little tricky because of the limitations placed on the number of schools that may qualify a 3rd team.

Instead of focusing on each of the differences, I think it will be more useful to look at the instances where there's a noticeably large gap between the ratings and the voters.  In nearly each case, the discrepancy can probably be accounted for by the fact that each team had relatively strong performances at smaller regional tournaments that were not included in the data set.

Oklahoma BC is one of the big losers because even while they end up ranked 11th in both sets of ratings, they drop behind other 3rd teams and get eliminated.  OU is most harmed by the exclusion of Wichita State, where they closed out finals.  Looking at the field, I might have to reconsider whether Wichita State should be included in the ratings, especially because there were at least a few second round applicants in the field.

Cal-Berkeley EM dropped 13 spots, most likely attributable to the exclusion of the Gonzaga and UNLV tournaments, where Cal performed pretty well.  Although, the ratings also didn't include Chico, where they had a pretty poor performance.

Gonzaga BJ dropped 10 spots due to their focus on mid-level regional tournaments (Gonzaga, Lewis & Clark, UNLV, Weber, Navy).  They only attended 3 tournaments included in the ratings (UMKC, Fullerton, Texas), where their performances were not strong.

One team that significantly benefited was Baylor BE, who jumped 10 spots.  They also had a few of their regular season tournaments not counted (UNLV, UCO, WSU).  However, my guess is that they benefited most from 2 things.  First, the ratings gave them a substantial amount of credit for their performance at Texas.  That single tournament, where they went 5-3 and failed to break, jumped them from 24th to 16th.  The reason for the jump is that they were significant underdogs in all 3 of their losses (Towson JR, West Georgia AM, Oklahoma BC), which would have heavily mitigated any ratings losses. They also had a pretty big win against Liberty CE.  The second factor is more speculative, but I suspect that the exclusion of districts results from the ratings probably benefited Baylor, whose quite poor performance may have influenced the voters.

In the end, I think that the results indicate that the specific needs of second round bids (who tend to travel to more regional-level tournaments) might require further consideration of which tournaments get included in the data set.  Some of this may have already been remedied for the 2014-15 ratings through the inclusion of the UNLV and Weber State tournaments.  I'll have to take a second look at Wichita State.  In the future, I may rerun the ratings with a more inclusive tournament schedule to see how it affects the results.  One possible middle ground could be to include elimination round results but not prelims from smaller tournaments.  This might give teams additional credit for strong performances but avoid the potential distorting effects of an isolated pool of debaters.

***UPDATE***
The addition of Wichita State tournament results bumps Oklahoma up to the 4-5 range, much more consistent with their rank by the voters.