Since the bygone days when I started playing, I've seen the circuit change in numerous ways, often for the better. Questions sucked a lot harder back then than they did now. I mean, you guys have looked at old packets, right? They're on the archive. While some tournaments have aged well (ACF regionals and Terrapin both looked good) for the most part there was some serious Charybdis-level sucking going on. I do not exempt the tournaments that I edited. What was I smoking? Most packet-submission tournaments nowadays tend to resemble those Terrapin packets. It's an unquestionably good thing that most tournaments have adopted ACF's technical innovations (no FAQTP questions, no variable bonuses). The spread of untimed tourneys has "de-sported" things somewhat, making tournaments into more of an intellectual exercise, which may or may not be good from your point of view. However, I think most packet-submission tournaments now resemble those old Terrapins of yore in terms of difficulty level as well. Things used to be much easier. For instance, my freshman year, after hearing the leadin "This period in Japanese history..." I confidently buzzed with "The Tokugawa Shogunate", explaining afterwards to my infuriated teammates that "It's always the Tokugawa Shogunate." I happened to be correct then, but I would certainly not be correct now. If you're not certain that packets have gotten harder, just pick a random old tourney from the archive and read the tossups, then compare it to something from last year. Junior birds are a change, and I think their expansion is a sign that teams want something simpler. I remember our first SNEWT. We asked teams for packets submitted by experienced representatives of their teams. What we got were some very difficult questions, as difficult as our QotC set that year. Teams would go 100-50 on those questions. Nowadays, that concept seems quaint; most JBs use an easier question set. The expansion of JBs and the success of ACF fall suggests that there will be a future for "ACF-lite" events around the country which advertise themselves as easier than ACF, but still using ACF-level editing and rules. I expect to see more of those, or perhaps to see some of the established tourneys jumping to an easier standard. Those qs are crowd-pleasers. I would also expect to see some easier tourneys that feature an open field, not just undergrads. Every tourney I went to my freshman year was packet submission. That's another big change. I went back to Paik's tour site and did some counting. By my count, last year, there were 124 tourneys listed on his site that actually happened. Of those tourneys, 67, more than half, did not involve packet submission. Wowza. Obviously, tourneys which don't ask for packets are thriving. I would expect fewer of them in the future -- I expect most tourneys which plan to feature packet submission to collaborate with at least two other tourneys around the country, perhaps with some greater coordination and planning beforehand than what goes on today. The big reason for that is the spread of "branded" tournaments. When I was a freshman, there was CBI and there was ACF, and that was it. Nowadays, we've got NAQT with its legions, and TRASH and ACF sponsoring multiple events a year. According to Paik's Tourcenter, exactly _half_ of all the tournaments held last year (62/124) were affiliated with one of these formats. Obviously, the brand name is something that works, and I expect to see a much bigger spread of these tourneys in the future. While ACF's unlikely to break out of the circuit ghetto, TRASH and NAQT have got legs and should be moving into HS and possibly even more mainstream venues over the next few years. The biggest expansion of the circuit, I believe, has not come through significantly more teams competing on the circuit, or through teams hosting their own unique tourneys. The expansion has come with the development of an infrastructure capable of supporting three large (30+ team) national tournaments, together with the associated regionals hosting more than a hundred teams each. It has been funded not through bringing in more quiz bowl teams funded by their college, but rather through an expansion of the high school circuit, now largely run and organized by college teams. This draws large amounts of funding from sources outside the insular college bowl community. It has also (as others have pointed out) produced a packet-savvy crop of college freshman who are better able to compete on the hardcore questions that we're asking now. The high school market is huge, and likely to expand more as NAQT focuses more of their energy on that sort of marketing and as teams realize the economic advantages of hosting tourneys. The biggest wild card in the college bowl world remains the unaffiliated tourneys. Not all tournament editors have the experience to smoothen out a rough packet, or to maintain difficulty level across a packet set. However, there's an ever-increasing number of dinosaurs, still interested in the game, who do. I expect that, following the sucessful models of "franchises" like ACF and NAQT, independent tourneys will become more and more centralized, under the control of some junta of devoted and unpaid grad students who will serve as editors. Freelance packets have also spread widely, mostly, I think, due to Anthony de Jesus. He wrote one for QotC back in the day, and that was the first experience I had with a freelance packets. Now they're all the rage. I expect freelance writing to expand, as well as freelance editing, until most tourney weekends resemble an ACF weekend. I am also somewhat mindboggled by the spread of single-author tournaments. I expect that we'll see more singles tournaments attached to long-weekend (academic/trash) doubleheaders, mostly written by one person. I don't expect to see many more Bongo-style tours-de-force. At a larger level, I expect to see NAQT hit the high school circuit everywhere, and TRASH to branch out to non-students. One or the other will probably land a TV deal one of these days, or at least a satellite radio show. No reason why quiz bowl can't be played on t
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