The Winningest Quizbowl Team of "All Time"

[liamstarnes27]

Hello,
I am starting my own data science blog as a personal project. For my first blog post, I have used the College Quizbowl Dataset to determine the most successful quiz bowl teams of this past decade, as well as to take a deeper look into UChicago quiz bowl's recent history. My results are at liamsblog.neocities.org for all who are interested!

[naan/steak-holding toll]

Interestingly, despite all of their hype and prestige, no Ivy League schools appear in the top five of the wins list (Columbia is the highest of the eight).

victory

[Cheynem]

I don't think anyone challenges the idea that UChicago wins a lot is the premiere quizbowl team, but determining this by just counting highest number of "wins" over the last ten years when a. not every team plays the same number of games, b. not every team plays the same difficulty of teams, and c. you're counting (as far as I can tell?) every A-Z team as one "team," which basically rewards very, very deep teams seems somewhat questionable to me.

[meebles127]

I don't think anyone challenges the idea that UChicago wins a lot is the premiere quizbowl team, but determining this by just counting highest number of "wins" over the last ten years when a. not every team plays the same number of games, b. not every team plays the same difficulty of teams, and c. you're counting (as far as I can tell?) every A-Z team as one "team," which basically rewards very, very deep teams seems somewhat questionable to me.

Regardless, this is definitely very interesting as a student data science project.

[Cheynem]

Oh, the project is certainly interesting and worthwhile and a lot of work--I just find some of the conclusions to be confusing (but maybe they were meant to be tongue in cheek).

[liamstarnes27]

Yes, I was being a bit tongue-in-cheek when I said that UChicago was the undisputed best team - of course, there are many different ways to measure that (nationals performance being the best). Still, I think looking at overall win totals and winning percentage is a valuable perspective because those statistics represent the overall strength and success of a team's program (despite the several potential sources of bias), not just the strength of an A team that might only play 2 tournaments a year together.

[Cheynem]

Yeah, that's a fair point--you certainly measure the strength of a total program/team. Certainly nobody would deny that Chicago is number one in that regard (and number one in many other things).

[Hypersmart]

I think this is a really interesting project! Great work! Would you have the breakdown of the schools with the highest win percentage by era, by chance? I find it really interesting that UVA, Stanford, and GT are top three in win%!

[liamstarnes27]

I think this is a really interesting project! Great work! Would you have the breakdown of the schools with the highest win percentage by era, by chance? I find it really interesting that UVA, Stanford, and GT are top three in win%!

Unfortunately I don't have that breakdown. The data only goes back to 2011 anyway, which pretty much only covers the "modern era".

[The Ununtiable Twine]

Alabama (38th in quizbowl wins) can say all they want about football [...] but when it comes to quizbowl, you can't beat the University of Chicago.

Aside from a few solo results at 2012 ACF Nats, the record shows that we were 4-0 against Chicago from 2012 to 2013, including this beauty.

https://www.naqt.com/stats/tournament/g ... _id=288887