What is this?
A college basketball tournament, modeled after the NCAA Tournament in the real world.
The competition is being centrally run by Drawkland this year.
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. Normally a group of conference hosts would take regional scorination duties for the final tournament, but this edition, we've had Chromatika volunteer to scorinate the entire final tournament as a neutral third party. 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? There's a lot going on now and the World Cup has even ended!
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 likely 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 you list. I will reiterate the bolded part, because in the past just bolding it wasn't enough: list them in order of your preference!! So 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.
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 don't put the school mascot/nickname/team name at the end of each school. If you do include those anyway, I will remove the nickname section of the signup (i.e. instead of typing "Very Good University Cardinals (XYZ)", just type "Very Good University (XYZ)"). Having that information for your teams is awesome, but save it for your roster post!
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.
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 should be 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 automatically qualifies 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. Once again, usually this is done by conference hosts scorinating specific regions, but thankfully this time we have a volunteer to impartially host the entire final tournament top to bottom.
Deadlines:
Signups will be kept open for two weeks. They will close Wednesday, February 17th, 2021 at around midnight EST.
In the past we've had anywhere from 150 to 200 nations, 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: 29 Nations, 208 Schools
