Sports Analogies

Sports analogies are a terrible way to argue about how quizbowl should work, for three principal reasons:

1) Quizbowl is not a sport, and thus there is no reason to do things the way sports do them.

2) Any given sport has millions of people who grow up playing it and a wide network of institutional support. If quizbowl had these things, many of the aspects of sports that sports-analogy fans want to impose on quizbowl would actually make sense. However, quizbowl does not have these things.

3) Empirically, 99 to 100 percent of people who use sports analogies in the past have done so to argue for bad quizbowl.