Cem,
That’s a really good question, I follow what you’re asking now. You’re right that the examples seem a little lopsided on this one. When we originally wrote the examples, I think we were trying to give the impression that one clear, obvious example of contact avoidance (eg a very clean layout bid near other players but with an obvious attempt to avoid all contact) would stand out to many players on the field and they would remember it. In other words, if several players remarked on a significant bid that was very clean, it might be enough of a very good example to award a 3. This is partly because such stand-out examples can be rare, or hard to remember. It’s even hard to remember, I think, whether a game was “mostly clean” versus “extremely clean”.
It’s pretty common for players to report small examples of unwanted contact, and there is often a grey area around whether this was “incidental” (“for the level of play”), so we also wanted to be clear that 1-2 “small” examples of (hopefully accidental!) incidental contact in a competitive game would not necessarily drop the score by a full point.
To be clear: a “Good” (score of 2) game of ultimate contains NO contact. But as we know, some (hopefully small) contact can occur by accident, and that doesn’t necessarily make the game “Poor” (score of 1). It’s only particularly bad spirit if the team is playing carelessly, or is keen to play with some physicality (more than their opposition expects) but refuses to scale that physicality down at their opponent’s request. One thing I’d add: a *single* instance of a very bad, hard, careless or dangerous foul can (and should) drop the score to a 1 (or even a 0 if it was horribly bad and cynical). We maybe could/should clarify that in the scoring examples.
Cheers,
Rich