Quizbowl in the "Alternate Universe": Introduction

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cchiego
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Quizbowl in the "Alternate Universe": Introduction

Post by cchiego »

Rather than update the "state of Good Quizbowl, State-by-State" rankings that I've done in the past, I decided to embark on a slightly different project: a look at the state of non-pyramidal quizbowl as well as the general degree to which there are all-subject quizbowl teams of *any* kind in a state. This is the Introductory post where I'll lay out my rationale for doing this, review the methods, and post links to each part. I anticipate posting four parts overall (The West, the Midwest, the South, and the Northeast), with about a 3 week gap in between each part. Comments and feedback welcome, especially if you have information about non-pyramidal quizbowl or quizbowlish activities to share.

RATIONALE

I'm doing this post in part to push back on some of the narratives that I've seen in recent years of pyramidal quizbowl triumphalism: that pyramidal quizbowl has defeated all challengers; that we are in the boring End of Quizbowl History stages of mopping-up the remnants of bad quizbowl; that the "Cold War" with non-pyramidal quizbowl has ended in victory. Younger pyramidal quizbowl players, raised entirely in a world where pyramidal quizbowl exists with many opportunities for fair competition on well-written questions, might not realize the degree to which their experience is an outlier in many ways for most students in the United States. In addition to the schools that have only known non-pyramidal quizbowl, there are also still far too many schools in the US without a quizbowl team of any kind at all.

I hope that this will encourage more people in quizbowl to focus more on outreach and think of ways to promote and organize quizbowl more effectively in more areas. Pyramidal quizbowl is a fairly fragile state of affairs in many states and the risk of backsliding to non-pyramidal questions or no quizbowl at all is always out there, especially considering competition from other better-branded extracurriculars. There are many, many opportunities to help bring pyramidal quizbowl to more schools and more areas and I hope that more people will consider doing so alongside of other contributions to the quizbowl community.

METHODS

Note that since most statistics combine middle and high schools into a general "secondary" category, I decided to include middle school competitions and teams in this project.

The numbers for "Nonpyramidal" teams came from a variety of sources such as the nonpyramidal quizbowl state tournament websites, various online searches for quizbowl-ish terms (Academic Bowl, Brain Bowl, Academic Team, Academic Challenge, Academic Competition, Knowledge Bowl, Academic League, etc.), and talking with people from these states. I tried to find the most-recent articles and information possible about these, but COVID cancelled many events, so sometimes I had to rely on pre-COVID numbers.

The numbers for "Pyramidal" teams were graciously provided by Jonah from NAQT, so they cover any school that played at a tournament using a NAQT question set (including TV and speedchecks) from 2019-2021. While there may be a few schools who play only non-NAQT pyramidal questions, I suspect that there are far more who play on NAQT questions of some kind and not any other pyramidal questions. Some of these formats may also use NAQT questions mixed in with other non-pyramidal questions or with various non-standard rules variations, so I would call this an upper bound on the total number of pyramidal teams in a state.

It is surprisingly hard to find updated, accurate counts of all secondary schools by state in the US; I decided to rely on this table from the US Dept of Ed for public secondary school numbers and this table for private schools. Note that this latter table for private schools sadly does not differentiate private schools by grade level. I thus used this table, which gave national-level numbers, to estimate the total number of secondary/combined private schools was about 38% of the total number of private schools in the country, and so multiple the number of private schools by .38 and round up to get an estimate of all private schools with secondary grades in the country). I know there are other websites out there with various estimates per state, but they often didn't list their data sources, so I'm going with this method.

LINKS TO EACH REGIONAL POST:
PART I: THE WEST (posted 3/7)
PART II: THE MIDWEST
PART III: THE SOUTH
PART IV: THE NORTHEAST

I plan on posting these every few weeks or so and hope to encourage discussion about potential outreach efforts (as well as reports of any leagues or competitions that I missed so that I can better estimate the numbers) in each of these regions on each post.
Chris C.
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Re: Quizbowl in the "Alternate Universe": Introduction

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Thank you for doing this. I hope that future installments are less depressing than the first one. It's great information either way.
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Re: Quizbowl in the "Alternate Universe": Introduction

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Since Chris linked to a post of mine from 2014, I'll state for the record that my views have since changed (as seen, e.g. in the penultimate section header here). Rather than seeing the good quizbowl community as a victorious post-"cold war" superpower, I now see it as more akin to an enduring breakaway republic, or a monastic community amid ruins: able to administer its own affairs and stand by its ideals, but surrounded by larger powers with whom it has little interaction or sway.
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Re: Quizbowl in the "Alternate Universe": Introduction

Post by cchiego »

Adventure Temple Trail wrote: Tue Mar 08, 2022 11:15 am Since Chris linked to a post of mine from 2014, I'll state for the record that my views have since changed (as seen, e.g. in the penultimate section header here). Rather than seeing the good quizbowl community as a victorious post-"cold war" superpower, I now see it as more akin to an enduring breakaway republic, or a monastic community amid ruins: able to administer its own affairs and stand by its ideals, but surrounded by larger powers with whom it has little interaction or sway.
Interesting, thanks for the post. This is a helpful expansion on those points. The analogy to monasteries is particularly apt in many ways. In that sense, I do think that quizbowl could use more Franciscans or Dominicans rather than Benedictines though.

My concern is less that pyramidal quizbowl will be "captured" by non-pyramidal quizbowl (although see recent events during COVID wherein non-pyramidal providers were able to make comebacks with relative ease) but rather that pyramidal quizbowl will be increasingly cut off from the vast majority of students in the country through the collapse of more isolated circuits, outreach complacency/sloppiness within more robust circuits, or competition with other extracurriculars. This would likely continue to increase the gaps between different schools and regions in pyramidal quizbowl, thus making it harder for newer schools/regions to get involved, and potentially turning the pyramidal bubble into even more of an echo chamber. I think quizbowl is much better off with more teams from a greater variety of geographic areas and schools. And I also think that pyramidal quizbowl has more to offer intellectually and in terms of competitive fairness than non-pyramidal quizbowl as well as many other comparable extracurriculars. Thus, continuing to work on expansion seems like a fairly strong imperative and there's still much relatively low-hanging fruit out there.
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Re: Quizbowl in the "Alternate Universe": Introduction

Post by echoes in the Othersea »

I know this has been inactive for a long time and maybe this discussion has been continued on a different thread but I would love to see more of this.

A couple of questions: One, if you were to look on a national scale, are there any national Quiz Bowl organizations as big or bigger than NAQT/pyramidal quiz bowl as a whole, or is the "alternate universe" mostly composed of state organizations resist to "outsiders?"

Two, I know this is the High School and Middle School forum, but are there organizations (other than Honda Challenge) directly competing with Pyramidal Collegiate Quiz Bowl? I ask because this relates to the question of players from non-pyramidal systems go to college, are there non-pyramidal college systems they can play or do they have to either play pyramidal stuff or stop playing.
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Re: Quizbowl in the "Alternate Universe": Introduction

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echoes in the Othersea wrote: Fri Feb 09, 2024 4:19 pm I know this has been inactive for a long time and maybe this discussion has been continued on a different thread but I would love to see more of this.

A couple of questions: One, if you were to look on a national scale, are there any national Quiz Bowl organizations as big or bigger than NAQT/pyramidal quiz bowl as a whole, or is the "alternate universe" mostly composed of state organizations resist to "outsiders?"

Two, I know this is the High School and Middle School forum, but are there organizations (other than Honda Challenge) directly competing with Pyramidal Collegiate Quiz Bowl? I ask because this relates to the question of players from non-pyramidal systems go to college, are there non-pyramidal college systems they can play or do they have to either play pyramidal stuff or stop playing.
Alas work and life took precedence over this, but I'll try to finish it up over this summer.

Pretty much all of the "alternate universe" organizations are state-centered, though there have been some interesting attempts at coalitions among the Knowledge Bowl states to run their own alternative national. Those don't seem to have done very well though and I suspect there won't be too many future attempts to do those.

What is interesting is how many of these organizations are now very much aware of pyramidal quizbowl, but continue to oppose it for whatever reason (Oklahoma for instance shot it down explicitly without stating why). That said, it seems like some are at least listening to criticism, with Arkansas and Kansas recently correcting at least the worst of their rules.

One area that I think is worth more of a spotlight are the JROTC competitions around the country. A few of the local competitions and the national level ones use NAQT questions, though from my understanding many local ones do not use pyramidal Qs. There have been some schools like Troy from SoCal that have crossed over into regular pyramidal competitions as well and hosted invitationals on NAQT questions.

Another interesting recent update: the National Academic League has apparently gone defunct, with some districts (Wichita) going over to NAQT questions while others (Utah-based ones) seemed to have started their own leagues.

At the college level, the main competitors to quizbowl seem to simply be other better-funded and better-supported student opportunities (Model UN, Debate, and Mock Trial for instance usually seem to get much more direct support) or career focuses as well as the presence of bar trivia and the challenges of dealing with the aggregatory effect of college admissions on quizbowl talent.
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Re: Quizbowl in the "Alternate Universe": Introduction

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I don't know with certainty, but my best guess on the Oklahoma decision was that NAQT offered them the use of an IS set, and they decided to keep their format. Their format is two 20-tossup quarters and two lightning round quarters (in which each team tries to answer 10 questions in 60 seconds). This format could be passable if the 20-tossup quarters used good tossups. (I just looked it up and they don't.)

To be clear, Oklahoma made the wrong decision in my opinion. That's not an attack on Oklahoma because lots of states including Illinois do the same thing. In my opinion, any state rule that prevents the use of an IS set or mACF set (or MS set for middle schools) is a bad rule. Quizbowl would be better if all such rules went away, and there are a lot of such rules in a lot of states. State organizations would be better off focusing on running the tournament and setting rules on tournament format and things such as protests, time-outs, substitutions, negs, bouncebacks, and anything else that does not get in the way of using the best question set available. For reasons that made sense 40 years ago but do not make sense now, lots of states have rules on formats and distributions.

You can have those rules and still have pyramidal questions, but it is better and much easier to just not have those rules so that you can easily find lots of good questions.
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Re: Quizbowl in the "Alternate Universe": Introduction

Post by zbennyy »

Stained Diviner wrote: Sun Feb 11, 2024 2:33 pm I don't know with certainty, but my best guess on the Oklahoma decision was that NAQT offered them the use of an IS set, and they decided to keep their format.
This is, as far as I understand it, pretty much true. The simple fact is that a vast majority of coaches in Oklahoma just do not care about the differences between the current OSSAA format and pyramidal quizbowl. Proposals to change the format, or even just to switch providers and use the NAQT sets that mirror this kind of format (like the TV sets), have largely fallen on deaf ears. To the bulk of coaches, things like the straight-up double-elimination format, wildly variate question difficulties, and complete lack of pyramidality in tossups are features, not bugs.

Which leads me to conclude that the real reason for the phenomenon Chris is noting...
cchiego wrote: Sat Feb 10, 2024 3:12 amWhat is interesting is how many of these organizations are now very much aware of pyramidal quizbowl, but continue to oppose it for whatever reason (Oklahoma for instance shot it down explicitly without stating why).
...is inertia. There is just so, so much inertia within an organization like OSSAA (which doesn't really care much about "Academic Bowl" anyway, and pays incredibly little attention or care to it). People have done a ton of great work to spread the word about NAQT tournaments and good quizbowl, and the pyramidal circuit in Oklahoma is in a really good place at the moment, but I don't think the OSSAA format will ever change.
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