Taking a deep dive into the rankings implications of an absurd set of results at Elite-Select Challenge, Northwest Fruit Bowl, and Cooler Classic
August 18, 2025 by Patrick Stegemoeller in Analysis, Recap
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While the eyes of the frisbee world were turned towards Chengdu as US and Canada were playing out an all time classic gold medal match at the World Games, bidwatch sickos were having their biggest weekend of the club season.
Elite-Select Challenge, aka “the Bid Swing Classic” aka “Who Wants to Cost Their Region a Bid?” aka “the Algorithm Decision” is the big one, with so many teams in and around the bid earning conversation in attendance. And around the edges of the TCT there were another couple tournaments like Northwest Fruit Bowl and Cooler Classic that ended up having dramatic impacts on the national picture.
Weather weirdness of the not-so-shocking-for-the-Midwest-in-August variety ended up cancelling the last round of games at ESC, so there was no champion crowned in the Men’s division and several teams did not get to their full slate of games across Mixed and Women’s play. That was just another juicy wrinkle for the algorithm weirdos out there who were keeping their eye on the ball of what really mattered – who walks away with a bid and who doesn’t.
Thanks to our projected rankings we can see the impact of the weekend on the rankings and now have a pretty good sense of what the national bid picture looks like. There were some rising triumphs, shocking falls, and a couple bid cutoffs that look too close to call. The Men’s and Mixed divisions in particular saw some really dramatic turns of fate, with the Women’s division getting one bid flip in for good measure.
(Important time for the caveat that these rankings are projections and subject to revision should any scores be re-reported or changed, which could be particularly relevant in the Men’s division as you’ll see below.)
Men’s
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