Week 129: Density and the network effect
Two types
In week 110, I noted my goal of getting to 2000 names on the list this year, and that failed, not spectacularly, but rather obviously. One of the major blocks that I have relied on for our list, Upstate New York’s Masterminds program, hasn’t yet been updated for 2022, and while I’m hopeful it will be populated later this year, we can’t hold up the list any further by waiting for it.
What has always struck me about the value of the Masterminds list is its density. The program covers a high density of the schools over its purview, and it manages to collect data from all teams, going to all colleges and universities. We try to do that with our lists from championship tournaments, but nobody else has managed a consistent, in-depth, survey of all of the schools their events serve. Getting to that level, without presuming an emphasis on top scorers or top teams, is a key to a more viable, larger, and longer-lasting collegiate circuit.
One of the holes I have in my coverage through newspapers is that a newspaper may only cover the valedictorian of a school in their article on graduation. I know this is a problem in that I’m only getting some fraction of the graduates from schools with interest in quiz bowl. That’s why my search of newspapers will always be less dense than a full listing from the teams themselves, and also because interest in quiz bowl is almost orthogonal to grading success.
What this got me thinking about this week is density, density of programs in areas, and how the past two years have reshaped the challenge of getting a density of programs in an area. Televised quizbowl has an inherent interest in density of teams throughout its viewing area, but the circuit by and large doesn’t express nearly the interest in density that it should.
The advantages of density
Part of the original purpose of the Masterminds list was to give an easy way home on break for students from different high schools who went to the same college. If you’re using that as a reason, you have to cast as wide a net as possible. You want your raw number of people to be as large as possible to increase the chance of forming a network of connections at a particular school.
A dense network of teams in an area increases the chances that teams communicate with each other. It increases the mutual interest in success of the programs, and incentivizes more events and connections between teams, coaches, and schools.
Density vs online
When we went into COVID, we resorted to online means to continue competition, and that technology opened up possibilities that could be used in a high density environment. A team could arrange a joint practice with another team, and scrimmage without needing to have a competition. A high school player could meet up with the teams at their college of choice, because they know the team exists. A high school team could demonstrate competition to their middle schools to recruit for the next year. But it seems like all we’ve accomplished is get a few teams the opportunity to compete in online tournaments every weekend.
This sets us on an economic hierarchy which could be troubling: Prior to COVID, the comparative cost of events for high school teams was something like this:
(Most Expensive)
Traveling to Nationals
Nationals in your locality
Traveling out of state for a tournament
Traveling in state for a tournament
Going to a local tournament
(Least Expensive)
During COVID, a lot of these options became non-viable. And were replaced with online tournaments.
(Most Expensive)
Attending Online Nationals
Attending online tournament
(Least Expensive)
Now here’s where it gets concerning. When you still have some online tournaments, those are cheaper to attend than even traveling to a local tournament.
(Most Expensive)
Traveling to Nationals
Nationals in your locality
Attending Online Nationals
Traveling out of state for a tournament
Traveling in state for a tournament
Going to a local tournament
Attending online tournament
(Least Expensive)
While an online tournament has its issues (security, lag, cheating), it’s not as if the online tournament is an obviously inferior product. This is the weirdness, if for a significant portion of the playing audience the difference between local in-person and online tournaments is only travel cost, those teams are not incentivized to attend any local tournaments.
Flipping this to the view of the online host, you might see the real problem that can develop. No online tournament needs to go beyond online to fill its capacity. You have to consciously effort to fill an online tournament with your local teams which might not be as connected or prompt with responses. If you can fill your field while keeping the cost of communication at zero, you have no incentive to use more expensive forms of communication. Online would have pushed away local teams, and the local teams are left unaware of possible activity. Instead of a network of all the teams, you would end up with a small network of well-connected teams, and then sets of local teams, that are connecting only locally, essentially what we have now, except with a smaller set of well-connected teams, who can then have a tremendous financial advantage by saving on travel for the same number of events. It ends up looking like a hub-and-spoke system, like the airlines used to have. And that network is entirely dependent on the teams competing in online tournaments doing at least some local matches. The moment they don’t, the teams local to them are disconnected from the system. The problem with that, is that there’s no upward mobility possible for teams if they don’t know there’s something they can move towards. And there’s no incentive for the networked group to communicate anywhere beyond themselves. It’s disheartening for me to see a possibility that could have expanded quizbowl dramatically actually end up with an equilibrium slightly worse for most teams, and reminiscent of the system that I want this book to change.
[At this point I stopped for a second during reread and realized what’s about to come does not necessarily follow from the above. I then spent some time rewriting this, but I may not be effectively arguing it.]
The other worry here is if you have a host aware of the ability to draw teams to an online tournament doesn’t require the shoe leather to capture local teams, they may simply migrate to online tournaments because the financial and effort return-on-investment will be greater.
A further worry is that all events are under pressure to fill their field to their logistical limit, because there is no disincentive to be a larger tournament. And if you can fill that last spot, you don’t care whether it’s the team across the street or across the country.
I have puzzled over this for a couple of years now, and I’m more or less convinced that for more local tournaments to serve local teams, there have to be more local hosts, for whom the value of local teams is much greater than teams at a distance.
So what kinds of hosts could we attract to avoid this fate, and maintain or grow local density?
Local colleges that may or may not have a team but value attracting top students to visit their school for a day might encourage them to take courses or apply to the school. Here there’s an admissions office aspect to approach, and a facilities aspect to approach. Very local colleges and especially branch campuses have space for events, and are always positively inclined to show off their campuses to high school students. It’s an approach I did in Pennsylvania in the mid-2000s to get events on campus, but I overextended myself by doing it across the state. If I were to do this today, I’d focus on the college in my town (Washington & Jefferson) and the three universities which have branch classrooms in the same office park as my office.
Local newspapers, media, or scholarship-granting charities could sponsor an event that brings together the schools within their readership. This is what happens for middle schools in Lowell, Massachusetts, where the Lowell Sun holds an annual competition over three nights and gives coverage of all the teams in the newspaper. The value to the paper is local engagement, and the schools get an event that excites their middle school students.
Local library systems or bookstores could serve as hosts for events that could attract teams from their vicinity. This is a practice among some libraries in North Carolina, and was something done by some Barnes & Nobles in Ohio. It brought publicity to the location, brought students to the location, and was a way to increase traffic during slow periods. Essentially this is the motivation every bar has for allowing pub trivia on site, adapted to an environment where high schoolers are the target market.
I’m sure there’s other ways to do this. These events would be frowned upon by circuit teams that value experienced moderation and tournament direction, which diminishes their value at reinforcing the network. The point is the model of circuit quiz bowl could be supplemented by other hosts and event structures. This would be supplementing the existing model, not supplanting, and would help to bring together schools that are already close geographically.
One last thing I came up with after last week. I spend too much time following the Steelers especially in training camp. But while watching the last pre-season game, I started turning around a sentence I need to include in the book.
The problem with television is that one team could be playing the equivalent of a pre-season game, while one team is playing a playoff game.
That crystallizes, for me, the role experience plays in televised quiz bowl, and how teams are forced into playing in a situation they not only aren’t prepared for, but don’t know how unprepared they are.