leggin89 Posted January 3, 2015 Share Posted January 3, 2015 First of all, I would like to start out by stating that the IHSWCA Team Duals is great for Indiana Wrestling. After the IHSAA decided (rightly or wrongly) to drop the team state portion of the tournament, the IHSWCA stepped up and has put together a pretty good tournament for help ensure that the State of Indiana Wrestling doesn’t fall even further behind other states in promoting the sport to everyone and not just the top individuals in each weight class. It is very important for the growth of the sport. It is clear with my post here, that we (Portage) would have been really excited to be invited and welcomed an invitation. Sadly, that invitation never was received. This post is not meant to attack the IHSWCA selection committee. It is merely to point out that the current selection process is flawed and can be improved to ensure that the very best metrics are used to project the next season’s top teams get invited to the tournament. Obviously, from a biased point of view, as well as a point of view documented by this season’s results, Portage should have gotten an invite to this year’s tournament and it is hard to call this a Team State Tournament without a team currently ranked #4 in the Indianamat rankings, #3 in the Genius Rankings, and #4 in the IHSWCA 3A rankings. Contention #1: The formula used to select teams seems to be flawed. Obviously, when the 4th ranked team in the state is not even invited to a tournament which invites 12 teams to compete for a dual state tournament, something is amiss. The complex formula used to select teams is very intricate and I have not dug deep enough into it to exactly understand how the points are accumulated from last season’s state tournament. However, I do understand it enough to find the flaws in the system. From what I can tell, the biggest mistake is in the way the multiplier is calculated and applied to the scoring system. When the multiplier system was released on the website last year, I had a very strong negative reaction to the scores. However, not knowing exactly how the numbers would play out and with the IHSWCA bumping up the number of teams invited to 12, we decided to not question them and let the whole thing play out. I have copied the multiplier scores here for those to look. When the scores came out from the sectional and regional results, we were told not to worry the scores will work themselves out. I cannot be certain, but I would take an educated guess that the multiplier had a basis that included an average of all the schools in the sectionals genius rankings. In the East Chicago sectional, that includes quite a few bottom feeder schools that cannot fill a lineup and in the Calumet sectional it includes the Gary schools who not only can’t fill a lineup but were ranked amongst the worst teams in the state by the genius. The problem with this methodology is that only 4 kids advance to the next round. If you have a sectional with 4 squads with solid wrestlers in all 14 weight classes and the rest of your sectional is filled with the worst teams in the state, that doesn’t necessarily mean it is an easy sectional. Perhaps, if this method is continued, there will be a way to use a different criteria to score the multiplier. According to the formula that produced the multiplier, it was decided that the Evansville Semi State had the hardest road to get to state, followed by New Castle, Merrillville, and then Fort Wayne. My first take when these scores were released was that the scores from the two sectionals that lead to the Calumet Regional were insanely low. After crunching the numbers, my intuition was correct. Here is the list of Sectionals by the number of State Placewinners: I understood that in order for our team to gain enough points to get in invite to the IHSWCA tournament that we needed guys to advance as far as possible in the individual state tournament. However, based on our multiplier and the fact that the Calumet Regional had the most state placewinners of any regional in the state, we were being punished on both sides. Every guy who advanced for our team had their scoring discounted by us being considered a weak sectional according to the multiplier. However, it is much more difficult to advance in a sectional which produced the greatest number of state placewinners. And even those who did advance, were put into spots with much more difficult draws the next week due to the level of difficultly of beating state placewinners to get a higher seed a better draw the next week. Here is a list of regionals by total state placewinners. Next we take a look at state placewinners by Semi State In summation, Portage went through an average-to-below average sectional, the toughest regional in the state, and the toughest semi state to advance guys further in the tournament and was given a multiplier of .96. Contention #2: Teams invited to Team State by advancement While taking a look at the Teams invited to the 3A IHSWCA tournament, I quickly ran down the numbers from last season’s state tournament results. Teams invited to the IHSWCA 3A State Duals advanced the following wrestlers to the regional tournament. It is very hard for me to imagine that a team that ended the season ranked 11th in the state, who was tied with Avon for the most returning starters to advance to regionals would fail to get an invite to a tournament in which 12 teams were selected and an additional 2 teams turned down the invite. These same teams advanced the following to the Semi State Contention #3: A New Point System to determine invitations for IHSWCA State Duals is needed I propose a scoring system that is much more transparent and easy to understand for the average wrestling coach, fan, and wrestler. My proposal is that Underclassmen get 1 point for advancing to regionals, another point for advancing to semi state, and an additional point for advancing to state. Outgoing seniors score their team .25 in each of these rounds. If you use this scoring system, it does a much better job of matching up with the actual rankings for the 2014-15 season on how good these teams actually are. Versus the current scoring system Class 3A Teams Again to repeat, this post is not intended to offend or to downplay the great success that the IHSWCA Team State event is. Everyone should be excited about tomorrow, I know that we sure are excited to watch and see what happens. But as the event grew closer, it became more and more bothersome that a top 4 team didn’t even receive an invite out of 14 teams. We want more than anything to be able to participate in the event and compete for a dual state title. We just don't want this same situation to occur to us, or any other deserving team next season. I wish all of the teams competing tomorrow good luck, and look forward to following it all day because after all it is a great day for Indiana Wrestling. infowrestling, grapplegirl and bell103 3 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Y2CJ41 Posted January 3, 2015 Share Posted January 3, 2015 Why didn't you do your point totals for the rest of the top 20 from the IHSWCA list? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sportsfangms Posted January 3, 2015 Share Posted January 3, 2015 Very nice post. Well thought out and you make very good points. I applaud you for providing supporting details and actually pointing out the flaws, rather than just complaining about why your team didn't get an invite. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bell103 Posted January 3, 2015 Share Posted January 3, 2015 Great post. It is a shame that Portage is not in the event. The multiplier is definitely the biggest issue with this whole system. A lot of schools have to do a lot more work than other schools just of because of what sectional and regional that they are in.... Also the Jay County regional had 9 state place winners instead of the 7 that you showed in your table from last year. Jay County's Regional is given one of the worst multipliers also. I do agree that the system needs to be simplified so the average fan can figure out their teams point total. ontherise219 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
maligned Posted January 3, 2015 Share Posted January 3, 2015 Leggin89, Thank you for the very thoughtful post about Portage's situation and about the state duals qualifying process in general. There is no doubt that Portage would be in the event tomorrow if we could hand-pick the best teams the week before the event. You have made an outstanding jump in performance that wasn't predicted by anyone except Portage fans. Here are a few thoughts on the points you've made: Concerning your point #1: The multiplier does not work how you think. It is not a calculation of who will get the most state placewinners from a particular sectional or regional, for example. Instead, it answers this question: how difficult is it for your team to get the "correct" number of advancers through sectional and regional--the number of advancers you deserve at your quality level? Although Portage's sectional and regional had a nice number of state placewinners, the depth of talent preventing good wrestlers from advancing to regional and then on to semi-state is very limited. It is not difficult for an average-quality team to advance more than an average number of kids to the next rounds. This is the same case for the famous Jay County sectional. They have an excellent sectional for individual talent among the top couple teams--but a below average talent pool in terms of preventing deserving wrestlers from getting through sectional and regional. Concerning your point #2: Although Portage had a nice number of guys through to regional and the first round of semi-state, the 3A scoring system reflects what 5 years of rigorous data analysis have shown: that the best teams in 3A in a particular year had lots of guys in the second round of semi-state and at state the year before. Although you had 14 at regional and 10 at semi-state, you then went 5-5 in the first round of semi-state and 1-4 in the go round of semi-state. Historically, those results are indicative of a good team the following year--not a great team. If you had wrestled better--you would have gotten in. (If the situation with Torres alone hadn't happened, you would have ended up with either an auto-bid or one of the top 2 non-auto qualifier scores...if someone else had gotten a win or two also, you were a slam dunk) Concerning your point #3: With our scoring system, Portage is the first ever clear top-5 team in the following year that our system didn't pick to invite to the 3A event (meaning we're 24 out of 25 in correctly picking top 5 teams in the years we've tracked the info). We still got 9 out of this year's available top 13 into the event (if you go by the current IndianaMat duals rankings). Overall, in getting the top 8 into the event (since that's how many there were until this year), we've been well over 75% accurate in the 5 years we've tracked information. No final 8 in the previous IHSAA system ever had 6 of the top 8 schools in the state--let alone 6 or 7 every year. The truth for the tournament selection committee is that it's very important to look closely at Portage's situation (and the situation of any good team that seemingly was good enough to be in the event but isn't) to improve how selection works and to consider the philosophies in place behind the process. But for supporters of teams that feel they deserve to be in, it's important to remember that it is a POINT SYSTEM. You earn your way in by winning matches that earn you points. And with point systems in competitions come the possibility for underperformance or injuries or bad luck. I think Portage had a couple of those things go against them and they didn't prove during the state series how good they were going to be and they unfortunately didn't qualify. Thanks again for the thoughtful message and creative ideas. We always read these boards and do our best to respond to emails and messages in hopes of making the state duals better within the extremely restricting confines that we're all stuck with (no all-in state tournament and no weigh-in exemption to better accomodate last-minute invitations being issued). Best of luck the rest of the season. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
infowrestling Posted January 3, 2015 Share Posted January 3, 2015 Transparent and easy to understand is a key message in the previous post. Ive sat down and tried to explain the process to high school wrestlers, high school wrestling fans, and local media members, and it is a true struggle. The IHSWCA Team State is great for wrestling in the state of Indiana. The process by which these teams are chosen needs to be "more transparent and easy to understand" for the common wrestler and wrestling supporter. Without a complex multiplier system we could possibly give more immediate results/updates, which I believe would garner more interest in both the individual and state tournaments along with being more easily explainable to those that matter. bell103 and bwoodjc89 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
GAT36 Posted January 3, 2015 Share Posted January 3, 2015 (If the situation with Torres alone hadn't happened, you would have ended up with either an auto-bid or one of the top 2 non-auto qualifier scores...if someone else had gotten a win or two also, you were a slam dunk) Maligned, knowing this the committee should have picked Portage as one of there vote ins. Either way does not matter anymore. Hopefully they will get an opportunity to represent at next years event. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
maligned Posted January 3, 2015 Share Posted January 3, 2015 (If the situation with Torres alone hadn't happened, you would have ended up with either an auto-bid or one of the top 2 non-auto qualifier scores...if someone else had gotten a win or two also, you were a slam dunk) Maligned, knowing this the committee should have picked Portage as one of there vote ins. Either way does not matter anymore. Hopefully they will get an opportunity to represent at next years event. It was tough...I wasn't in the room, but I did compile profiles for all the teams so I know all the nitty gritty details. New Pal/Westfield/Portage had very similar rankings, Genius scores, numbers of returning starters, and profiles of backup/incoming talent. Even if Gaige had placed at state, the closeness between those 3 and others would have remained because they had their best-case scenarios too. The other 4 schools that qualified for voting had amazing profiles too and are having fantastic seasons. I don't know how the voting went down, but I know the committee went deep into the night hashing out all the tiny details. Thankfully you're right... we're only a couple weeks away from doing all this again. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
1prouddad Posted January 3, 2015 Share Posted January 3, 2015 Why didn't you do your point totals for the rest of the top 20 from the IHSWCA list?cause maybe he didn't feel the need to. I appreciate the fact that he is trying to show a potential flaw. busstogate, BeastMode#31 and Tonyv 3 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ktownwrestling Posted January 4, 2015 Share Posted January 4, 2015 Thanks for the post and comments to explain how it works. Knightstown is 1A and I wondered how the team selection process worked and think they could have done well there this year. They have had a solid season and have only 1 senior so hope they are selected next year. Looks like a lot of time is invested in trying to get it right. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
littlevito Posted January 4, 2015 Share Posted January 4, 2015 Don't worry, Jay County Regional has one of the lowest multipliers yet had 3 teams in the finals. Short Jay, bwoodjc89, infowrestling and 2 others 5 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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