2012 MCRRC Race Series Tiebreaker Rules

Prepared by Arthur Drisko
Proposed 2012 Roads/Cross Country Championship Series Rules.

1. The number, Q, of races needed to qualify for each series shall be half the number of series races actually conducted, timed, and scored, rounded up to a whole number if necessary.

2. You must be an MCRRC member on the day of the race to earn points for that race. Non-members are not counted in determining series points.

3. Your age group for the year will be determined by your age on January first of that year. You must disclose your age when registering for your first series race to be eligible for age group prizes.

4. In each race points will be awarded to the top ten males and females overall and to the top ten males and females within age groups. The first-place runner will receive ten points, the second-place runner will receive nine points, and so on down to the tenth-place runner who will receive one point.

5. Your series score is the sum of your Q highest individual race point scores. Ties among point-scoring qualifiers and potential award winners shall be broken according to the tiebreaker rules below.

6. At the end of the year open and age group prizes will be awarded in male and female categories as shown in the tables below. There shall be no double awards; overall award winners do not also receive age group awards.

Age Group Road Awards Cross-Country Awards
Open 3 3
0-19 3 2
20-24 3 2
25-29 3 2
30-34 3 2
35-39 3 2
40-44 3 2
45-49 3 2
50-54 3 2
55-59 3 2
60-64 3 2
65-69 3 2
70-74 3 2
75-79 3 2
80-99 3 2

Tiebreaker Rules:

T1. Head-to-head competition. The tied runners shall be scored 10-9-8-etc in EVERY race in which they ALL participated as if they were the only participants, and the total tiebreaker points shall determine rank.

T2. Next best. This tiebreaker score is the sum of your Q+1 highest individual race point scores, as in Rule 5 but counting one more race. Not running a (Q+1)st race counts as zero points. T2 is repeated with Q+2 races, Q+3 races, etc, until the tie is broken or none of the tied runners has run that many races.

T3. Total distance. The highest sum of the distances of all races completed, as listed on the race schedule web page.

T4. Total time. The least total time in all races completed.

T5. If a multi-way tie is partially broken by one of these rules (including any stage of T2), any remaining subsets of tied runners shall be broken starting over at T1.

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Comments:

Rule 1. This number of races is 6/11 for the Roads Series and 4/8 for Cross-Country, as they are now. However, the rule includes a cancellation policy to avoid problems as we had in 2010. If one XC race is cancelled, it becomes 4/7. If one Road race is cancelled, it becomes 5/10, and everyone will know this in advance. Warning to XC runners: don't wait until the last race to qualify, if it gets cancelled, you're stuck. Note that the policy can even handle multiple cancellations, turned-into- fun-runs, or unrecoverable scoring problems.

Rule 3. There are a couple of runners who do not disclose their ages and so do not appear in age group standings. The change to this rule makes it clear that they may not "jump in" to their age groups at the end of the year and collect an age group award.

Rule 5. The "best Q races count" language has been removed, as it is ambiguous when it comes to tiebreakers. The new proposed tiebreakers can use more races.

Tiebreaker rules: As has been discussed as mcrrc-discuss, the old tiebreaker rule is ambiguous when there is a multi-way tie, and it cannot break all ties in the XC series.

Rule T1. In the case of two tied runners, this is equivalent to counting wins and losses. Any head-to-head measure will in some circumstances encourage strategies of not running or of DNFing when the race is likely to give a disadvantage relative to a rival. Still, it seems like the best measure of "who's faster," and the subsequent tiebreakers are designed to encourage participation.

Rule T2. This rule is explicitly designed to encourage running an extra race or two, which increases the chance that there will be head-to-head races and T1 can break the tie.

Rule T3. T1 and T2 still won't break the dreaded 40-40 tie in the XC series where each runner only ran 4 races. T3 makes the longer races slightly more valuable to encourage all the award aspirants to run them and thus face each other. With the current list of XC races, a 40-40 tie would always be broken by T3 (if not sooner), thanks to the 8.5k race. It is extremely unlikely that T3 would be invoked in the Roads series (unless it had a cancellation) .

Rule T4. This rule should almost never be invoked. If it is, then we know from T3 being tied that the runners have run the same distance, so total time is a reasonable, if not completely fair, criterion.

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