NCT
The National Championship Tournament (NCT) was held annually by the College Bowl Company, Inc., to determine its format's national title during the company's affiliation with ACUI from 1977-1978 to 2007-2008.
Occasional matches appeared on radio or TV during that time. Various formats were used to determine the field in the initial years. From the mid-1990s on, the champions of each of the fifteen ACUI region tournaments, as well as one second-place finisher chosen at "random," were invited to the NCT, held on a different ACUI-affiliated college campus each year.
Due to the inferior quality of the questions, game format, and officiating at College Bowl, the tournament was considered less legitimate than good quizbowl events such as ACF Nationals and, ultimately, the NAQT ICT. Compounding the inherent issues in determining a fair champion out of the College Bowl field was the rapid withdrawal of elite quizbowl teams from College Bowl participation from the 1990s onward. Early defections by Maryland and Georgia Tech were followed by the exit of nearly all contending ACF programs by the end of the 1990s save for Chicago and Michigan, who themselves did not compete after the 2003-2004 season. Of the last five champions of College Bowl NCT, only one, 2006 UCLA, was good enough to even make the championship playoff bracket of the ICT or ACF Nationals.
The College Bowl-ACUI program was discontinued after 2008 due to its decades-long unprofitability for the College Bowl Company.
Other pages on champions from the radio/TV version of College Bowl (1953-1970) and the 2021 NBC revival are to be created in the future.
College Bowl NCT top finishers/locations
- ↑ Formats used for old NCTs: https://web.archive.org/web/19970506201422/http://www.collegebowl.com/archives/archnct.html
- ↑ This team is denoted "Harvard-Radcliffe" in some sources. Harvard and Radcliffe began a formal affiliation in 1977 and merged into one university in 1999. Most likely, some students who began their university careers at an independent Radcliffe College did in fact play on this team.
- ↑ This was one of the two years in which the NCT used a 3-stage, 24-team format. The additional teams invited besides the 15 regional champions were Earlham, Harvard, Marshall, Oklahoma Baptist, Texas Christian, Georgia, Iowa, Notre Dame, and Vanderbilt.
- ↑ This was one of the two years in which the NCT used a 3-stage, 24-team format. The additional teams invited besides the 15 regional champions were Davidson, Marshall, Wisconsin-Eau Claire, Temple, Ohio State, Vanderbilt, Wake Forest, Wichita State, and Yale.
- ↑ "Georgia Southern University-Armstrong Campus" is the current full name of the school that was known as "Armstrong State College" at the time of this tournament.
- ↑ Many years of NCT standings on the College Bowl website list only the 15 regional champions, including several years in which the existence of a 16-team tournament with a wild card can be verified through other sources and the wild card team is thus noted on this page. Most likely there was a wild card team and a 16-team tournament in 1986, but so far the identity of that team has not been determined.
- ↑ The Williams team attended the NCT site but was not permitted to participate in games due to their faculty sponsor failing to arrive.
- ↑ There was no wild card team in 2003. The tournament ran with 15 teams.
- ↑ Florida State no-showed to the NCT. All of their games were recorded as losses with FSU scoring 0 points and each opponent scoring their tournament average PPG.