Wait a minute. Didn't we strike Judge Dredd?

Here’s the thing about MJP. It only works if everyone does it. But there are different levels of not doing it.

First of all, a team can ignore it completely. That is, for whatever reason, the debaters do not assign rankings to the judges. When this happens, the system automatically gives all the judges a rank of 1 for those debaters. In practice, this means that those debaters will always get the 1s that their opponents chose (assuming that their opponents did avail themselves of the system and didn’t also ignore it). This is not necessarily terrible, since most of the judges ranked highly are fairly universally so ranked, and there is a good chance that the ignoring debater is getting a judge that they would have ranked a 1 themselves anyhow. On the other hand, one debater’s 1 is another debater’s strike, so there is a possibility that the ignoring debater is heading into certain doom. So debaters who don’t rank can suffer, although they are not guaranteed to suffer. Why don’t some teams rank? I think that those teams that don’t find MJP to be wrong in principle. I certainly initially found it wrong in principle, until I learned more about it, and compared it to the alternatives. No judge-assignment system is perfect, and MJP is not the cherry-picking of judges that I had initially assumed, and I’ve come to appreciate it in the appropriate contexts, namely big, national-draw tournaments, where it allows the debaters to select a fairly wide pool of people with whom they are at least familiar as potential adjudicators. MJP equally helps the old-fashioned and the new-fangled debaters in finding judges attuned to their styles. (The idea that any good debater ought to be able to pick up any ballot is no longer true in LD. A good debater ought to be able to pick up the ballot of any judge he or she understands provided that judge isn’t prejudiced against them for some reason, but that’s about as far as it goes, and even then, sometimes the judge misses the reason you really did win and awards the ballot to the other side and there’s nothing you can do about that except bang your head against the wall. Such is life.)

So, a debater who chooses to ignore MJP could find that it doesn’t work in that debater’s favor, although that is not guaranteed to happen. That’s not particularly surprising.

On the other hand, everyone doing MJP means the following: that everyone who participates in the ranking of judges has entered their own judges (or purchased coverage), and that those judges are the ones that show up at the tournament. You may think that this is pretty obvious, but you’d be surprised how often people abuse it.

Here’s the problem. You enter your judge, Joe Dredd, to cover your entry. MJP is opened, and some people rank Judge Dredd a 1, some rank him a 3, some strike him, etc. The way MJP works, there is a proportion of each rank set by the tournament director. That is, you get a certain number of each. So, let’s say I strike Judge Dredd, and I was allowed 5 strikes. And then Judge Dredd doesn’t show up at the tournament. I now have 4 strikes. The debater who was going to bring Joe D along, however, gets 5 strikes, because, obviously, Joe Dredd was not on their list because he was their judge.

You can see the problem. In early days of MJP for us tabroom.com types, we occasionally had the judge drop/name-change capability still on while MJP entry was in process, which meant that every five minutes you had to reenter your data. We can fix that in the system, of course, but we can’t fix the fact that a judge is promised by the entry deadline, and between the deadline and the tournament, that judge doesn’t show up, and that absence is screwing up the tournament.

So, what can you do? Well, if you’re a coach, you bring the damned judges you entered. End of story.

And if you’re the tournament director? Well, you make sure that people bring the damned judges they entered, or as close as possible thereto, by eliminating all MJP from any teams who have promised but not delivered their judge(s). That is, at the registration table, if a judge is dropped, the team loses their preferences, period, end of story.

Draconian? No. Every single entry in the whole broad field is penalized somehow by every judge who doesn’t show up. It is not feasible to rerank every judge between the close of the registration table and round one, so since corrections can’t be made, punishments must be issued.

We’ve been kicking around this policy for Yale, and will presumably follow through at other tournaments we run with MJP, which isn’t all that many. But the few that do will put attendees on warning, that the shenanigan of blowing off judge requirements will not be allowed. The good news is, only a few teams really ever do this. The bad news is, it’s the same few teams tournament after tournament. The other good news is that, if they try it in the future, they’ll pay the price. The other bad news is that, knowing these people, it won’t stop them. Still, they’ll no longer get away with it. That is, I fear, the most we can hope for.