Next up, the TOC

I haven’t gone to the TOC for a while now, but I’ve always found it an enjoyable event. For one thing, it’s got the luxury of time, as did NDCA last week, among others, which makes attending something less than a crushing burden. Our normal life is two-day tournaments, usually of six prelims plus five elims, and that’s a lot of hoo-ha squeezed into a short amount of time. Success in debate relies as much on stamina as skill, in many cases. You have to win debates when you’re dead on your feet while the judges are dead on their butts, which is a radically different business than when one and all are fresh as the proverbial daisies. Drink lots of water, avoid fried foods, get as much sleep as possible and never forget that your judges would prefer being anywhere else: that’s pretty good advice on the average weekend. TOC-length events are different. Rounds are paced better, and no one is inherently exhausted (although some teams do succumb to the temptation to stay up to the wee hours prepping themselves into a coma, a process much like cramming for tests, with about the same chance of succeeding). There’s time to eat, and on top of that, it’s usually nice weather so you get the warm Kentucky sun when you’re not offering three RVIs, a response to the theory argument, then aff, then neg, then throw it into neutral and roll down a hill and see who runs out of the way. As a result, the debating tends to maintain a high level of concentration on all counts. But still, it is just a debate tournament. Those who will do the best will be the ones who look around and realize that. Just one more debate tournament. That’s all it is.

One thing that people will complain about is that they won’t judge much. There are so many judges that mathematically speaking even the most preferred adjudicators can take a nap or two (when they’re not judging). I’ve heard people complain about this as if it were aimed at them—“I’ve come all the way to Kentucky and only judged two rounds”—not realizing that everyone who came to Kentucky only judged about two rounds. Of course, I will point out that it is probably the same people who complain during the season that they had to judge every round, that they had to judge the first round in the morning and it was too early, etc., etc. Complaining, like pi, is a constant, not reliant on the circumstances in which it occurs.

The biggest news is that LD will be going to 8 rounds because of the perceived neg bias. I’ve talked about this bias a lot with the other professors on TVFT, and we talked about it endlessly at NDCA (where we actually did it), but I have to admit I’m still on the fence, not regarding the bias (which as far as I’m concerned is mathematically proven) but on the solution. Having 8 rounds at TOC means that most of the 5-3s will be tossed into a run-off, and as the Panivore points out, will flip a coin… O’C is pushing for side equalization and keeping 7 rounds at Jake, which sounds good on paper but I’ve never done it and haven’t thought it through yet. My biggest fear of TOC going to 8 is the runoff effect, that now all the large tournaments will go to 8, simply because that’s what the TOC did. At some point it behooves everyone, short of changing the structure of the LD round, to learn to pick up a few aff ballots, if you know what I mean. That is, the neg bias isn’t so strong that we can assume that you will always lose when you go neg so why bother to have the round. In other words, until a solution to the problem arises, work on your aff. Of course, that may be easier said than done. The P tells me that the announcement of the 8 rounds has raised a hue and cry throughout the land. Perhaps. As hues and cries go it’s more worthy than the other h&c that I have no interest in discussing. I’ll be curious to see if it stands.