Alright people listen up !!!!! As I have read all the comments left on this site about this subject.Yes certain teams received better cap score when they should not have, but when you have system that can be,lets say controlled with only a few set of eyes thats is what you are going to get.
To Gremlin and Tripleplay,
Tripleplay I agree with your well written critique CAPs system. I would add that an additional flaw in the system is that it treats all away games the same whether they are 5 miles from home or 200 miles from home. I suspect but can't factually make the case that the CAP system benefits teams in the greater Seattle area because they get credit for away games that occur in the local area. I wonder if you handicapped the teams on that basis it would result in a better result. I would take the critique of the state tournament a little further and say that the WYS has misdesigned the Challenge Cup "such that strong teams do not have a chance to prove themselves on the field". So we have a choice: 1. the Challenge Cup is a complete crap shoot with a team's luck in the draw having a significant sometimes overriding impact on who makes it to the final rounds, or 2. the CAP system that is based on field performance but lacks adequate data-points, includes perverse incentives and for some obscure reason is not published, or 3. a politically influenced league system with teams and games being randomly assigned right up to the day play starts. A league is only a good predictor of relative strength only if each team plays each other team twice once at home and once away. Randomly picking who plays whom, how many times and where just undermines the validity of the league results.
I think we need to to go back to the drawing board.
Gremlin: you make a good point but lets be clear - coaches make cynical decisions based on the current system. For example, in a tournament several years ago with a different team we need one point in our final round robin game about half way through the goal was scored. Before the restart the coach cleared the bench, put all the defenders in forward positions, and put the goalie at forward. He/she told the players to have fun, work on a new aspect of the game and take it easy. We still won the game 2-0 but it was not because we tried too. Later that day we played the same team in the final. It was a tough hard fought game but we won late in the game when the other team ran out of steam. Did our coach violate the rules or did they decide lose the battle in order to win the war?
You know, maybe one of the reasons the CAP score system is being keep so secret is so coaches can't game the system. Just saying!!
Goldengoal: Project negative, moralistic and fact free judgements on people you don't know much. Frankly, your post says far more about your character than it does mine. I am only saying that based on small data point I have (GU-16 P2 league results and published State Cup results) the CAP results track with how the state described them. The moral judgements about which system is fair, I leave in your hands as you seem so well equipped to make them.
To Johnny and Susie: I would get out a coin and a piece of graph paper. I would draw a line in the middle and tell Johnny and Susie that they should flip the coin. If its heads: move the line up one square and to the left one square, if its tails down one square and to the left one square. I would ask them to repeat the coin flip 20 to 50 times and watch what happens to the line. When they were done I would explain to Johnny and Susie that the line did not continue moving only up or only down was because its is a fallacy to assume that more coin flips would result in more of the same result. This is true because each coin flip can only have two outcomes. I would then explain to Johnny and Susie that basing moral and ethical judgements on fallacies is unchristian and that the CAP system acts in much the same way in that it is a fallacy (falsehood) to assume that simply playing more games will result in a team's CAP score going either up or down. I would also explain to Johnny and Susie that unlike the coin flip experiment CAP scores are earned on the field by teams that are playing against each other. Therefore, the only way to make your score move up is to play well against stronger teams.
Based on that example, I would tell Johnny and Susie that the CAP system is deeply flawed but its not a crap game and its results are not skewed by the roll of a dice.
Next, I would explain that the Challenge Cup draw was based completely on the roll of a dice and therefore advancement from some groups had as much to do with luck as with the quality of the teams. I would tell Johnny and Susie that the WYS may have created the silver division games because it understood that basing tournament advancement on a crap shoot was unfair to the stronger teams that lost the crap shoot and gave a false sense of accomplishment to the weaker teams that happened to win the crap shoot.
Goldengoal you are right our conversation on this topic is over. I've read your posts on other topics and its clear that no amount of facts will dissuade you from your god given right to make moral judgements about people you have never met. Its simply not in your DNA to do otherwise. God bless.
