The format for the 2002 NAQT High School National Championship Tournament is ten preliminary rounds of power-matched games on Saturday, followed by round-robin playoffs on Sunday morning, followed by finals between the top two teams. The preliminaries are quadruple elimination, meaning that a team must lose four times before it cannot advance to the Sunday morning round-robin playoffs. However, each participating team will play its ten guaranteed games on Saturday, even if it loses its fourth before the end of the day.
Only eight teams will advance to the round-robin playoffs on Sunday. If more than eight teams have three or fewer losses at the end of round ten, then an extra round will be played to pare the field down to eight teams. The Sunday playoff matches will be a round robin among the teams with three or fewer losses from Saturday. Records from Saturday will not be carried over. The top two teams from the round robin will advance to the finals. If the top two teams have the same record, the final will be a single game. If they have different records, the lower team will need to win two games and the top team will need to win only one.
Power matching ensures that teams play other teams throughout the competition with identical or similar records. After the initial pairings, all opponents are determined by a team's performance in the tournament. NAQT will try to minimize games of teams from the same state playing each other until the afternoon matches, but this may not be completely possible. NAQT will also try to avoid intraschool matches unless they are absolutely forced.
If one or more small schools qualify for the playoffs, the school with the best record at the end of the playoffs will be given the title (with a playoff if necessary). If no small schools make the playoffs, the school with the best record at the end of Saturday's rounds will be given the title. If multiple small schools are tied with the same record, a playoff will be organized on Sunday morning.
Because pairings are determined by similar performance, we believe that the power-matched quadruple elimination format will produce an exciting tournament, with close nail-biting games, many of which will be between teams fighting to stave off elimination. As former players, we are all enthusiastic about this format, which we believe is the fairest one, given logistical constraints, to determine which team walks away with the title of National Champion.
NAQT adopted this format to address a number of concerns expressed by coaches and players in prior years, all of which we believe to be valid. Pools, despite our best efforts, will never be seeded accurately to ensure an even distribution of strength of teams, especially with the diversity of geography and how teams qualified. Power matching minimizes, if not eliminates, the problem of mis-seeding of teams, as a team's performance on the day of the tournament--and nothing else--determines whom it plays.
Moreover, even if pools could be perfectly seeded, pool play produces a large number of mismatched games, many meaningless, which are neither significant for determining a champion, nor interesting for the losing team. We wanted a format that produced lots of close, exciting games, all of which (before elimination) were meaningful to the outcome of the tournament. In addition, pools and many other formats make inevitable that teams with one or two losses would be eliminated from playoff contention. We wanted a format that minimized fluke losses and put a premium on sustained performance. With the caliber of the teams coming to this tournament, NAQT did not want an abnormal result (of whatever cause) to knock a school out of contention. NAQT also wanted a format that did not require complicated tie-breakers that could slow down the tournament and make it difficult to determine whether teams were still alive or not. Under quadruple elimination, there is no complexity: until a team loses four times, it is alive. If a team has three or fewer losses, it can win the championship by winning the rest of its games.
Finally, with the introduction of the Top Small School award, NAQT needed a way to objectively compare the performance of schools that might not end up in the playoffs; using the results of split pools to determine the Top Small School would be problematic due to our inability to seed the pools properly to begin with. Power matching will allow the Top Small School title to be fairly awarded to the school that emerges from the tournament with the best record among eligible schools.