Week 147: The Air Raid of Quiz Bowl
plus Rivals, and Study Guides
No practice this week because school started today.
Mike Leach's passing in December was sobering for me. Of all the coaches in college football he seemed the most interested in things outside of the game, not even as distraction, but he seemed genuinely curious about nearly everything he ever came across. It's for that reason I felt a small kinship with him, and often thought of whether his design of the Air Raid offense had an analogue in quiz bowl.
The chief innovation of the Air Raid offense is not compatible with quiz bowl, that being if you have four or five effective offensive passing plays, if you polish those to function perfectly, you'll be able to beat your opponent's defense consistently, without needing to diversify your playcalling. This doesn't work in quiz bowl because you can't choose your plays, those are at the whim of the writer, and governed by the packet distribution, so there’s a couple orders of magnitude more plays than in the Air Raid. But the conclusion drawn in choosing the Air Raid is very much in the spirit of quiz bowl: If you have something where you have an advantage over your opponents, focus on executing that as well as you can, and try to execute it against your opponent as often as possible. It's the reasoning behind everything from writing your own vanity packet to specialization.
I had planned to work through a single book during this winter break, Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything, but somewhere between Mike Leach's passing and the beginning of the break I ended up starting on a different book: William Amos' The Originals. It's a reference book on literary characters and the people who inspired the authors of those characters. It's very British, very mid-20th-century, and most of the time very obscure and gossipy. I've seen more references to Oliver St. John Gogarty, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Inspector Charles Frederick Field than I really should ever want or need. But when it does intersect with quiz bowl's canon, it's been useful in reminding me of something about the Air Raid.
Part of making those few plays matter in the Air Raid is to have a focus on stretching the defense, and making connections beyond where the defense can intercept. Either your receivers are outrunning the coverage, or they're getting to the point where the ball will be delivered at exactly the right time. If we apply this to quiz bowl, there are clues that we know are useful (as we can see in The Originals) and that we know because they are peculiarly interesting to writers, and uniquely identifying, they end up in the first couple clues of questions about those works of literature or those literary characters. So if those clues are asked, and they will be, and we have studied those clues as a group for a number of questions, we essentially know where we need to be as soon as those clues are given. By reading a book like this, and (as I've been doing) noting the clues that will come up, and turning those into practice material, we've polished our routes on a number of plays. Essentially The Originals is the 4 Verts play in an Air Raid offense.
There are a few sources like this, which rather than give you the history of a subject or a few subjects, cover a particular type of clue over many particular answers, where those clues are likely to come up early. Most are literary or historical, or artistic, but they give you the coverage of the early clues without really going into what the late clues would be. As long as you can distinguish between the answers that will come up and those that won't, that has a certain Leachian logic to it; if you have the answer from the obscure and interesting clues, you're never going to get to the later clues, so why bother with them?
I just made my way through the second third of the book, and I'll convert my notes into study guides and questions when I'm done, but I think this will be a fruitful technique to include in the book.
As part of the "eat my own dog food" movement, I've put into place one of my suggestions and tried to manufacture a rivalry. The public high school nearest to Seton is very much nearest to Seton, and has been a participant in at least one NCT. Since they haven't been to an event since 2020, I'm not only trying to cultivate a rival in contacting them, but I'm hoping I don't have to help them restart their own program. I'm proposing two things for them, simply touching base to see if they're getting information about the tournaments in the area, and the opportunity to scrimmage, either online or in person.
We'll see if it works, it's zero risk and significant reward if it works out.
The other thing I've been doing during winter break is seeing if I can adapt study guides I had written for college teams and make them applicable for high school competition. During the 2000's I spent a lot of time working out pdf files for use as study guides for college quiz bowl, and shared them with the teams at Pitt and CMU. I even kept them in a directory on the website I used to maintain to have them easily accessible. It was my habit in that to do ones that covered 90% of the answers in the subject, and as a result they were always a little over-detailed; for instance, one of my pieces on Wars Of Succession went into the Wars of Bavarian Succession and Polish Succession, which come up so rarely now as to be near useless to study.
After a mention in the final practice of the year of Nietzsche (which I mentioned in Week 144), I promised to give them a short guide to philosophers that might come up, and I turned to the guide I wrote for college. I had only included notable works in the document, since my knowledge of clues here is weak for college, but I know that to beat most teams without someone who has taken philosophy courses, you need to be able to jump in when a work is mentioned. But what was included on this sheet was way, way to complex for undergraduate college, let alone high school.
I did like what I did with this in splitting it by levels of exposure, not necessarily difficulty.
Level I - Either you know these people from a high school social science class, explaining them as philosophers, and not giving them more
than a cursory glance, or people more known from roles other than philosophy
Level II - AP History, or possibly an intro to philosophy course for college non-majors. The bulk of the philosophy category lies here.
Level III - May appear as the third part of a bonus at low college levels, may appear as a tossup in mid-to high college levels.
Level IV - The top end, proceed to accumulate everything from level 1 to here, and you'll capture 90% of all questions on philosophy
Level V - Rarely appear even at the highest level, attached here for completeness
On the sheet Level II was a double column of philosophers, and they proceeded left to right. I liked this because it gave them all the material, the sources I used to compile the list, and the ability to stop appropriate to the level of competition.
I've rewritten this for high school, but since there's a philosophy course available at the school, I'm truncating this new sheet with the leftmost Level I column, and then write Level II into a second study sheet. With additional biographical and relevant concept data, it should be useful for the team, and something I can include as supplemental materials for the book. Hopefully by next Tuesday, I'll have this ready for printing.