Re: College Bowl NCT Wild Card

ZAMM_Phaedrus · Thu, 21 Feb 2002 14:32:02 -0800

At 01:39 PM 2/21/02 PST, darwins_bulldog1138
wrote:
>However, the regional/wild-card system is stil kind of
pointless. What with most of the decent teams abandoning
CBI, there are never more than eight teams (in a good
year) that have the slightest chance of winning the
thing. This year, there's maybe six teams, and that's
being generous. So I do agree with your original point
about contracting the field--to eight, instead of
fifteen, so that more people can spend that weekend on
questions that don't suck.

One must remember that
the Regions as they exist are those drawn up by
ACU-I, not College Bowl. I've heard some rumors of ACU-I
redrawing those regions, but that has yet to happen. And I
don't really see a feasible alternative. I'm going to
have to go with Mary Oberembt's figure of 200+ schools
registered for College Bowl Regionals. I see no reason to
doubt that at this point, although I'm know some teams
didn't show up for various reasons. I'm guessing
however, that the number is closer to 201 than it is to
299. 

NAQT SCTs this year had, by my count, 145
teams, but they came from 76 schools. College Bowl has
to deal with a more diverse geographic spread of
participants. There's a certain fairness involved in giving all
teams a reasonably close site. I strongly support
NAQT's efforts to try and hold SCTs in the Pacific
Northwest and Canada for that purpose. Those particular
SCTs have been criticized in the past for giving
opportunities to teams who have no chance of winning anyways.
Taken to its extreme, that argument suggests that NAQT
just decide who's going to win, pick SCT locations
near those teams, and screw everyone else. (And, BTW,
the fact that you can claim that only six teams have
a chance to win shows that CBI is not the
completely random crapfest that some claim. Otherwise, every
team would have a shot to win. Keep in mind, I'm
debating only the random part, not the
crapfest.)

Let's use the big what-if. What if NAQT, instead of
College Bowl, had the ACU-I contract? 1) They'd get teams
from more schools. 2) They may or may not have to
limit the number of teams per school. 3) The quality of
staffing will probably go down because they'd have to use
the volunteers from ACU-I who currently staff College
Bowl tournaments. 4) They'd still have to use ACU-I
Regions as a basis for qualification.

There are
differences between College Bowl and ACF as extremes. NAQT
kind of falls in the middle, but then again not, just
as not all ideologies fit on a single axis between
conservative and liberal extremes. There will always be people
who like College Bowl, and who are quite rational in
doing so. They're the people who got into this because
they like things like Jeopardy! or Trivial Pursuit or
NTN and want the space of possible answers to
resemble those sorts of games. They like speed as a factor
in games. It feels like a sport to them. ACF, well,
I can go on and on describing it. I always happened
to be able to exist in both worlds. Given a choice,
I definitely prefer ACF, but I could take both as
what they were, nothing more. And some people want to
be in-between, with the excesses of neither.