[Orthofort]

I projected the point cutoff a number of ways. (Since my team has a vested interest in the cutoff since we have 72 district points)

1. Before the season even started, I made a prediction using last years rankings. I used the ratio of the number of teams from this year to last year, multiplied that by 102 to get about 84th, subtracted a few to fudge for chairman's, and found the district points of that rank in 2015, and got my preseason projection of 71 points being the cutoff.

2. I took the current rankings as of week 4. For any team that just played one event, I added the points they got from their first event, and ranked them. This only gave a score to 391/411 teams since the other 20 hadn't played an event. Then by taking this ratio and multiplying it by 102 we get almost nearly 97. The points of 97th place in these projected rankings is 72 points. This doesn't account for chairman's, but there's also historically a smaller proportion making it from State's from those teams that play week 5 and 6, possibly because the level of competition has already gotten better. So I guessed that these two factors might cancel out. It's worth noting that I did this same method after week 4 last year, and arrived at 65 which was just about the cutoff last year.

3. I took last years district points and using the scores from highest to lowest, made a graph with the x-axis being 1st, 2nd, 3rd, all the way to 345th (ignoring two teams that didn't play events), and the y-axis being pre-MSC points. I then did a regression for this graph with an emphasis on the upper half fitting well. It ended up fitting a 4-parameter logistic curve quite well. Thus, by using the equation y=d+(a-d)/(1+(x/c)^b) I got coefficients of a=167.13, b=0.65, c=106.18, d=-43.16. I then assumed that one would need to be in top 96, thereby accounting for chairman's. Using the figures of 345 teams in 2015, 411 teams in 2016, we again take that ratio and multiply it by 96, and get 80.58. Find y(80.58) and get 71.39. Again getting that the cutoff will be between 71 and 72 (i.e. that some teams with 71 will make it).

Given that I've used three different methods, I am now willing to say with some confidence that the cutoff will be around 72. This does not reassure me (since my team has 72 points!)