What is this?
A college basketball tournament, modeled after the NCAA Tournament in the real world.
The competition is being organized by Drawkland this year, with other nations as conference hosts.
Who is hosting?
Unlike other competitions in the NS Sports world, the NSCAA basketball tournament uses a collection of hosts, instead of one single person. Each host will be assigned anywhere between 1-2 Conferences to scorinate. The final four will take place at a venue to be decided. You can bid to have the final four hosted at a venue in your nation! Please post these bids in the NSCAA Discussion thread (linked above) or in the RP thread (forthcoming). Don't post them on this thread.
Hosts will be required to use xkoranate, but may choose whatever scale they desire for implementing RP bonus. However, it is mandatory to apply a RP bonus for a roster posted by a nation.
Isn’t this going to conflict with other tournaments?
As stated, this tournament is modeled after the real NCAA tournament, and this is the time of year that tournament takes place. Likewise, this tournament will also take place throughout March, and going into April. So, yes, it will conflict with these things. However, there won't be daily cutoffs during the conference and tournament stage, so you don't have to RP every day for this tournament to get bonus for every MD.
How do I sign up? (READ THIS SECTION CAREFULLY)
When you sign up, include up to eight schools from your nation, but rank them in order of preference. If there ends up being more signups then expected, I may eliminate schools at the bottom of your list. I will reiterate the bolded part: list them in order of your preference!! The bottom schools will be the ones you are most willing to leave out if some schools must be cut. Also, the nations at the top of your list will be considered your better schools, and when putting the conferences together, I will try to mix and match things, so that for example, the favorite school of ten different participants are not all in one conference, and are spread out.
Being honest, we haven't had to trim schools from nation signups in the past few years, so I doubt we'll have to do that this year either. HOWEVER, please still list in order of preference.
Also, when signing up, place your national trigramme after the name of each school. (Not just one of them). Entries which do not do this will be conditionally rejected until they are fixed.
A side note, please DO NOT put the school mascot/nickname/team name at the end of each school. This has been emphasized, because nations have continued to do this over the past couple years. For instance, instead of typing "Very Good University Bulldogs (XYZ)", just type "Very Good University (XYZ)". It's a hassle as the organizer to have to edit each school signup in this way, so please keep it out of your signup. Having that information for your teams is awesome, but save it for your roster post!
Once again, if your formatting is not correct, your signup will be automatically rejected until the formatting is fixed. It's not that hard to do, and it makes my job immensely easier. Thanks!
Puppet Policy!
As with pretty much every other NS Sports tournament, we'll allow users to sign up one (1) puppet in addition to their main nation. You, as a user, can't sign up more than two nations to the NSCAA. Also, as is the precedent literally everywhere else, please include a note in your signup if a nation is a puppet and who the owner is.
Format:
*Please note that there is no set number of conferences right now. The amount of conferences will depend on the number of sign-ups, and the number of willing conference hosts. These formats should stay this way but are still subject to change if necessary. We've also run with 14- and 15-team formats. We're essentially shooting for something in the range of 25-35 matches, while allowing no more than 2 conferences per host.
10 team Conferences
- Triple Round Robin (27 games)
- Four games per matchday until the final regular season day, where three games will be left
- Each conference holds a conference championship, which the winner of automatically advances to the 64-team tourney
- Top 6 teams get byes into the quarterfinal round, Bottom 4 teams have to play against each other for the remaining quarterfinal spots
- One playoff round per matchday until a champion is crowned
12 team Conferences
- Triple Round Robin (33 games)
- Five games per day until the final regular season day, where three games will be left
- Each conference holds a conference championship, which the winner of automatically advances to the 64-team tourney
- Top 4 teams get byes into the quarterfinal round, Bottom 8 teams have to play in for the remaining quarterfinal spots
- One playoff round per matchday until a champion is crowned
16 team Conferences
- Double Round Robin (30 games)
- Five games per day
- Each conference holds a conference championship, which the winner of automatically advances to the 64-team tourney
- Standard playoff tournament starting with a full Round of 16
- One playoff round per matchday until a champion is crowned
In all conferences, scoring is usually done every other day. Note that the conference championship playoff format listed for each conference size above is set in stone. In some past editions we gave some flexibility on the format, but this year we'd like to make everybody do the same thing to make things more consistent and logical.
With the playoffs, the conference tournament champion and regular season champion automatically qualify for the big tournament. The rest of the teams are decided by a committee made up of every person who scorinated a conference during the season. Seeding will be done mostly according to performance in the conference stage, conference championships won, and other considerations. We will make an effort to keep single user's schools from being clumped in one side of the bracket, so to this end some schools may jump or fall a bit in the seeding ranks. Once the field for the "Ultra 64" is decided, scorination will happen every other day until we have a final champion.
Deadlines:
Signups will be kept open for at least one week, perhaps two. If signups have stagnated I may close the window early. I may close things on March 3rd if the numbers are looking good, but signups will close for sure on Monday, March 10th, at around 11:59pm EST.
In the past we've had anywhere from 150 to 200 schools, so that's what we'll be shooting for.
If you wish to host a conference or two, indicate this on your signup. Anyone who is an established host on NS Sports that wishes to be a host here can make plans now that they will be hosting something. Less experienced hosts may be considered, but your inclusion as a host is not guaranteed.
Signups: 19 Nations, 120 Schools
