by Robespierre__ on Thu Apr 25, 2013 7:09 pm
All,
I first would like to emphasize that the proposed 30 game schedule was not mimicking what the original TO was going to do. As a matter of fact, I have no idea what he was going to do since we were left ZERO records, ZERO schedule and only some spreadsheets from past years that revealed the previous TO did a TON of manual work instead of automating the results portion of the tourney. I spent a good chunk of my life creating that automation in the first weeks we took it over. I came up with that schedule to try to create some balance in a structure that is inherently imbalanced (8-team conferences and 15-team conferences all happening at the same time).
What I could not know when I did that, was how long it was going to take to get things truly organized and up and running such that we were only sending out one game a week for a while (after the weeks of no games) until finally we got going with 2 games a week as you no doubt have noticed. But it was too late. The tournament was going on too long what with the conference tournaments and March Madness looming behind it. And every two weeks later the tournament goes, I seem to lose a player that needs to be replaced. Yet more time and hassle. If I had a crystal ball back then, I would have had less regular season games and worked to balance the home/away games a little better. An automated round-robin generator was used and it seemed to have some teams with long streaks of home or away in the beginning and the opposite in the end. This affects those in the Big East and A-10/MW the most which have 15 teams in them.
So the bottom line is, I and the other TOs are doing the best we can. The decisions we make are not to screw anybody over. We don't spend as much time organizing this as we are because we are trying to piss anyone off. And it is impossible for you to know exactly how much of a timesuck a big tournament like this is unless you could really see all that has gone and is going into it. It frankly would be pretty easy for me to get angry over what feels like colossal insensitivity on your part to the reality of how we see things. But I won't let myself do so (and OSUJacket's post helped me do so tremendously -- thanks for that) because this really is a great tournament, and I enjoy playing in it and enjoying running it with McShanester, Hath, GenJestix, Shoop, and RobbieDub. There is no way this thing would have happened without their help.
So in conclusion, we did not change things from the way they were in the beginning because when we took over, there was no roadmap for us. We did our best to stay faithful to the way it had been done, but we have basically made it up as we went along. This continues in that vein. If any of you perceive it to be unfair, I really am sorry for that. But at the same time, having heard your complaints, we are not deviating. Tournaments begin to suck when they go too long, and our sense is that this one will be hitting that critical mass if we continue the extra 3-4 weeks it will take to complete the schedule as originally imagined. March Madness in August? Really? I will confess that this perception may be in part to my own management fatigue. But to that I can only tell you that I could not fully know what this tournament was going to require from me until I was knee deep in it. Next year, we will have the luxury of planning things in advance and creating a team of TOs robust enough to make running this tournament manageable for people who have busy lives outside of CC. I think we have done more than a passable job of running things this year. But that is just one man's opinion.
Robes
Just kidding. You guys have done a lot to get this in better shape.
