Hi Tony,

You're right, Jerry Budd put an incerdible amount of work into redesigning the matrix system and a lot of what he proposed was incorporated into the final version. FWIW, a number of Board Members spent a considerable amount of time experimenting with a variety of normalizing formulas to tray and overcome the inequities of the unequal judging exposure we're dealing with before Jerry's proposal was even submitted. Unfortunately, none of them panned out. The Board determined that there were some areas in Jerry's proposal that needed some tweaking. It's not fair for me to critique Jerry's proposal here so I won't, but his proposal served as a substantial basis for the the final cross-proposal that was passed. I know you don't like keeping a round from each day so we'll have to just agree to disagree on that one. That issue is all a matter of what is more acceptable. If you keep the best four rankings, a superior pilot can be avoided by anybody outside of the superior pilot's group. For me, that's just simply unfair. If you require that one ranking score be kept from each day, that means that every pilot must face every other pilot and keep at least one score from those meetings at the risk of having some misfortune that causes a pilot to lose both of his flights on one day. As a regular Nats competitor, I'd rather have the fairest system possible with the risk of some misfortune spanning 2 rounds taking me out of the game, but that's just me.

All of this can be revisited by the Contest Board in the future if someone makes a proposal. I would hope you'd agree that we're better off than we were before by using a ranking system rather than relying on scores that are produced by unequal judging exposure and a system that has a legitimate means of overcoming a rainout on one of the prelim days as well as a means of legitimately declaring a National Champion if the Finals are rained out.

Verne