Expert help needed in MS Excel

I'm the President of a Trivia club on my campus and I've developed a formula which I want to use to calculate player quality. The formula is only moderately complicated, but programming it into Excel is a MONSTER.

For instance: Part of being successful isn't just answering a question, but the speed at which you answer it. As such I plan to keep track of how many words it takes a person to get the answer. The formula not only rewards you for getting a correct answer, but how fast you do so. I did a Standard Deviation on a sampling of 40 questions and found that if a person knew everything about any given subject, they could answer in 13+/-5 words. (Without going into more boring details about the formula about itself...) In the cell for the players name I will enter how many words it took them to get the answer. I need to know how to make Excel see that quantity as "1" for part of the forumla, and the actual number for another part (I'm assuming I'll need to do some sort of boolean T/F for this). This would be optimal, but I guess I could just add a category for number correct to get around this.

That's only the tip of the iceberg. In a separte column I will be keeping track of who answers quickest. The quicker your answer in relation to your teamates the better multiplier you get to the score for that question. So I need to know how to enter a players name, have excel recognize that name as 1st, 2nd, 3rd (Depending on the column it's in) etc. and apply the correct multiplyer.

There's a few other things I need help with as well, but I don't want to flood the first post with everything. If someone could help me with just this it would be a great start. Thank you.

Jam it back in, in the dark.