The USAG MAG Bonus System - Does it make sense?
There are two questions here: is the system working, and does it make sense?
Let me say that USAG is transparent about the bonus. In the past, they were not. There was no table, and the bonus wasn’t reported in the final score. I don’t like the bonus system, but I’m not a coach or a gymnast and am not in a position to judge how well it works for development and motivation. As long as the organization is transparent, everything else is commentary.
Get ready for the commentary.
Does it work? No one really knows. The USA has won medals since the system was implemented, but it is impossible to assign causation due to the small number of events and the inability to separate the outcomes from other factors such as a coincidental change in the pool of athletes competing and how that pool interacts with a specific code of points.
The simplest answer for why an athlete isn’t competing a routine with a certain D score is because he can’t.
Syque Caesar (the creator of the original system) specifically stated in his Neutral Deductions Interview that he believed the system should be used for development and National Team selection, not for selecting teams that will actually compete.
In one case, scores containing the bonus actually are the sole criteria for a selection decision, as those are the scores being used to place the winner of the AA automatically on the team if he is top 3 on 3 events.
National team selection is different. The bonus allows athletes to try out risky routines and reduces worry about losing National team funding. USAG does want to predict who is willing to take those risks, and the bonus helps here.
From this point on, when I use the word team, I mean a team that will be competing
Selecting a team that will compete is a prediction, not a reward. The best selection process happens under the rules that govern the competition being selected for. The goal is to predict how well the team will perform under FIG scoring, not under an artificial bonus system.
Does the system make sense as written?
Maybe.
The bonus cutoff scores have to be chosen correctly, or they may generate odd results (including rewarding some events more than others). I’m not saying the existing ones are wrong, but it needs to be considered.
It can make a difference for athletes who are on the wrong side of the cutoff.
For example, the current pommel D score floor is 5.4.
Athlete 1 does a 5.3 PH routine and gets no bonus. Athlete 2 does a 5.4 routine and gets the bonus. Say that maybe the floor, based on the international field or whatever metric chosen, should be 5.8. Then neither athlete should get bonus, but in this example, athlete 1 doesn’t, and athlete 2 does. This could mean the difference between first and second place in an AA competition, especially if the bonus cutoff score is incorrectly calibrated on more than one event. The system is also not serving its intended purpose if this happens.
In some cases, the system rewards upgrading more than punishes a fall that it may cause. Say an athlete upgrades his high bar from 5.7 (0.202 bonus) to 6.7 (1.274 bonus). He gains 1 point in D score and 1.072 in bonus, for a total increase of 2.072 points. A fall is only one point (and there are usually associated deductions), so theoretically an athlete can gain more from an upgrade than he would lose from a fall. This is an exaggerated example (it’s rare for anyone to increase his D score by a point), but should that even be a possibility?
The E score is part of the total score, and the total score is what matters. There were multiple routines on Day 1 of Nationals with E scores in the sixes. Is this what we want? One solution is not to award bonus if the E score drops below a specified value.
Finally, National Titles are being awarded based on the scores with bonus, a system that was originally intended to aid in development and make the US competitive with countries such as China and Japan. This is especially acute for the All Around and for athletes who fall just below the D score needed for bonus. China and Japan are not competing at our Nationals, so is it fair to athletes to use the bonus system to award titles in a competition against other Americans?