For the second straight year, it appears that the scoring for Law School Bowling is somewhat FUBARed. Last year, it was fuzzy math. This year, it’s just miscommunication between the SBA and the students.

Everyone I talked to last night and today assumed, based on the SBA’s mass e-mail earlier in the week, that we were supposed to be reporting the Top 4 scores per game. The only question I heard was whether we were supposed to select the Top 4 bowlers based on each bowler’s score in each game, or based on each bowler’s total score in the two games combined… and there was also some question about whether bowlers who sneak in third and fourth games can substitute those scores for lower scores earlier in the night. But nobody seemed to question the basic premise that we were supposed to be reporting a total of eight scores.

Well, it turns out that premise was wrong. According to an e-mail I just received from the SBA in response to a query about the scoring procedures, we are supposed to report the “top 4 individual scores for the night…each player can only count 1 score.” Apparently, it doesn’t matter when each player’s top score was registered — first game, second game, third game, whatever.

I suppose there’s nothing inherently wrong with that system, but I personally am discinclined to like it, because it makes it less likely that weaker bowlers on a given team will make it “on the board.” A flukey performance by an inconsistent bowler, like my third-place 137 in the first game last night, is likely to be surpassed by four better scores at some point during the evening, even if it’s not surpassed during the game that it actually happened in.

That said, even under the new system, I actually still made it on the board last night, albeit in fourth place instead of third. Our top 4 individual performances (max 1 per player) were:

Chris 204
Joel 166
Nick 166
Brendan 137

Or, to be more specific…

Chris: 164, 201, 200, 204
Joel: 166, 156, 114
Nick: 97, 166, 163
Brendan: 137, 78, 103
Brian: 110, 119
Becky: 80, 95

UPDATE: Confirmed: “It is just the 4 highest scores on your team, regardless of what game.” So Chris’s 204 would have counted, even though it was in his fourth game… but, as it turns out, none of it will count.