I’ve been asked before what would happen if I only used NAQT results, as a projection for HSNCT. So, I sat down and did a top 25 set of rankings using only results from NAQT sets.

I can’t say I buy into the results as an accurate prediction for HSNCT – I think it’s really just results in teams’ best performances being hand waved away because they weren’t on the “right” set, and I think that the skills necessary to perform well at HSNCT are measured just as well on, say, a HSAPQ set or a good house-write as it is on an actual IS set.

This time around, the parentheses denote the team’s place in the real rankings.

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Not much to say here. I didn’t add BHSAT stats because I don’t have time to figure out the adjustment on it yet. Anyway, there’s not a whole lot of big moves on this one.

I’m working on a couple other things on the rankings that I hope to post in the next few weeks.

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(Edit: corrections made on this set of rankings are listed before the jump)

Well, this took long enough.

I plan on doing a separate commentary post when time allows, but here’s the big news as far as the rankings:

1) Thomas Jefferson A lost one of their players to a transfer, causing their drop to 46th place from 8th.
2) Loyola’s strong performance at Huskie Bowl drives them into the top 5. The rest of their resume is comparable to that of Seven Lakes, and potentially expands the group of teams I currently consider the front line of national title contenders to five. However, Loyola’s current positioning depends in part on the difficulty of a set (Richard Montgomery/Torrey Pines’ housewrite) that has been played by a small number of teams, and a set with some quality criticisms. Note that my difficulty adjustments don’t have any real way to consider if something is well or poorly written (although appropriate difficulty would be part of a rubric used to evaluate a set).
3. There were a lot of teams moving in and out of the rankings; to save time, I’m skipping the section denoting these movements.
4. If pressed for a second tier of title contenders, I would probably place the cutoff after 14th place.

Edit 1: I was confused on which player left TJ; as a result, I’ve looked at the stats they had without that player, and have moved them to 31st for the time being.
Edit 2: I misread a statline for Auburn & moved them up accordingly. Also, I changed the date of the month. Not on this post, in reality. Thanks, Time Cube.
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This has taken a bit longer than I anticipated, but the newest update is in process. I have added all stats I could find prior to this past weekend, and am more than halfway through calculating new difficulty adjustments. After that work is complete, I’ll just have to shift around teams’ list of best performances and then move the rankings around as necessary. (For now, I’m pretending this past weekend of tournament never happened.)

If I had to estimate a completion date, it’d be Wednesday at the earliest.

I’ll touch upon this more in a later post once all the work is done, but currently it looks like we have what amounts to a jampacked race for the national championships. I have a tier of the top four favorites followed by about eight teams that, while contenders, would be somewhat surprising if they took home HSNCT or NSC.