OT: Football Rare Entries Contest

[LaxRef]

This is slightly off-topic since it doesn't deal directly with officiating, but considering everyone here is interested in football I thought it would be appropriate to post it here. As indicated, please don't post entries here, but instead mail them to the address provided.

Football Rare Entries Contest

There have been numerous general knowledge rare entries contests, but as far as I know this is the first that is American football-specific (although in the past we've run a general sports contest, a golf contest, and an Olympics contest). The object is to:

a) Answer each question correctly, and

b) Give answers that will be given by as few other people as possible.

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Reply ONLY BY EMAIL to [email protected]; do not post to any newsgroup. Your subject line should say "Football Rare Entries." Entries must reach me by 6:30 p.m. (U.S. Eastern time zone) on February 6, 2005. Results will be e-mailed to all entrants, and then discussion will take place on rec.games.trivia and rec.sport.football.pro. See below the questions for a detailed explanation of the contest rules.

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All answers must be given in English, and in all cases "football" refers to American football.

0. Name a primarily defensive player who scored during a Super Bowl.

1. Name a quarterback who has thrown for at least 7500 yards during his NFL regular-season career while primarily throwing with his left hand.

2. Name a Super Bowl Champion who during the course of the postseason defeated a team it played but could not beat in the regular season.

3. Name a school that has played in a bowl game that is currently one of the BCS bowl games, but has not played in *any* of those games since
1980.

4. Name a city that was part of the name of an NFL team the year after that NFL team moved there from another city. For the purposes of this question, a team has not moved if the city officially associated with the team name has not changed.

5. Name a theatrical-release motion picture in which at least two major characters are involved in playing or coaching American professional Football

6. Name a league that played professional football in America and had at least one game televised regionally or nationally.

7. Give a one- or two-word name for a specific type of legal, non-kicking offensive NFL play. The name must be something that the announcers of a game might normally use to describe the play to the viewing or listening audience. The name of a specific player may not be part of your answer. General-specific scoring will be used for this question.

8. Name a stadium that is the regular home stadium of a Division IA school, currently seats more than 80,000 fans, and at some time has changed their playing surface from artificial turf to grass or a surface resembling grass.

9. Name an NCAA Division IA school that has a live, nonhuman mascot present on the sidelines for at least one home football game each year. Mascots that consist of humans dressing up as nonhumans are considered human.

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Directions:

As usual, for each of the items above, your objective is to give a response that (1) is correct, and (2) will be duplicated by as FEW other people as possible. Feel free to use any reference material you like to research your answers.

Your message should preferably consist of just the 10 answers, numbered 0 to 9, along with any explanations required (put in parentheses next to your answer), and your name (if it won't be in the "From:" line).

I may ask you to supply further information or to justify of an answer, and I reserve the right to make a posting to consult on any judgment issue before my final decision. If you know your answer will require justification, you should probably save us both some time by including supporting information with your entry. Often a web address is sufficient support if it is for a reputable site.

You can expect an acknowledgement when I read your entry. Your email address will be posted in the results if I don't see both a first and a last name, or an explicit request for a particular form of your name to be used.

Questions are not intended to be hard to understand, but normally no clarifications will be given during the contest. Only the first answer you submit counts; no changes are allowed after submitting an entry, nor alternate answers within an entry.

For my convenience please do not quote this message when responding. Mail only your answers, and these in plain ASCII or ISO 8859-1 text: no HTML, attachments, Micros--t character sets, etc. (People who fail to comply will be chastised in the results posting.)

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Scoring:

The scoring is a little complicated, but that needn't worry you. Just try to give correct answers that you don't think a lot of other people will submit. However, here is how the scoring works:

If your answer on a category is correct, then your score is the number of people who gave that answer or an answer I consider equivalent. If wrong, or if you skip the question, you get a high score as a penalty. The scores on the different questions are MULTIPLIED to produce a final score. Low score wins; a perfect score is 1. All entrants will be listed in order of score in the results posting, but high (bad) scores may be omitted, and the answer slates of the top few entrants will be posted.

The penalty score for a wrong question is the median of:

- the number of entrants
- the square root of that number, rounded up to an integer
- double the highest score for a correct answer on the question

For example, say I'd asked for a member of the Beatles. 20 people say Ringo Starr, 1 says John Lennon, 2 say Richard Starkey, and 4 say Yoko Ono. After looking up Richard Starkey I decide it's the same answer as Ringo Starr and should be treated as a duplicate answer; then the 22 people who said either Ringo Starr or Richard Starkey get 22 points each. The one person who said John Lennon gets a perfect score of 1 point. The four people who say Yoko Ono are wrong, and get a penalty score. The penalty score is the median of: (a) number of entrants = 27 (b) sqrt(27) = 5.196, rounded up = 6 (c) double the highest score = 22 x 2 = 44. Thus, in this case, the penalty score is the median of 6, 27, and 44, which is 27.

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Judging:

As moderator, I will be the sole judge of what answers are correct, and whether two answers with the same meaning (like Ringo Starr and Richard Starkey) are to be considered the same. It is also possible that I may consider one answer to be a more specific variant of another: in that case it will be scored as if they are different, but the other, less specific variant will be scored as if they are the same. For example, if there was a contest with a question for which three people answered 'Ford Taurus,' five people answered 'Plymouth Breeze', and two people answered 'car,' the scores for that question would be Ford Taurus = 3, Plymouth Breeze = 5, and car = 10 (assuming all answers were judged to be correct).

Thus, it is in your best interest to make your answers as specific as possible while making sure they still answer the question correctly.

I will do my best to be fair on all such issues; if you don't like my judgments feel free to say so or to run a contest of your own.

Many thanks to Brian Van Dorn, who was extremely helpful in the preparation of this quiz and who wrote several of the questions. Without his help, this contest might not have been possible. It was a true sacrifice on his part because he'd like to enter more than anyone, and he's no longer eligible. I'll no doubt ask for his assistance in judging as well.

Incidentally, this contest is for fun only; there is no prize other than the respect and admiration of your peers. Good luck and have fun.