In a small bit of good news, the local television competition has begun taping and airing new episodes. The good news with that is that they are continuing, simply because I know the local quiz bowl community couldn't handle that much increased demand for competitions this year. The slightly bad news of that is they are using the format that eliminates buzzer play from each team. Unsurprising given their connection to the It's Academic franchises, which arrived at that solution to continue competition last spring. That format still has the possible flaw of ties being unresolvable, but for purposes of the book that is to come, they haven't added any new wrinkles to their questions, so I can remove that block preventing me from completing the book, and I can move on to see what other programs are doing.
This is draft of a section of the book, which will need to be rewritten. It's written from the viewpoint of someone familiar with circuit quiz bowl when it needs to be written from the viewpoint of someone familiar first with televised competition. Some of the opinions expressed within don't need to be expressed, or addressed until much later in the book.
Last week the powers that be for Jeopardy! announced they would be using a team format for the next College Championship. This week I'm going to consider the subject of Colleges & Universities, because it may be unique among categories in that it's present in televised quiz bowl, Jeopardy! (esp. the College Championship), pub quiz and the like, but mostly absent from circuit quiz bowl. That's almost precisely opposite other cases where a subcategory appears in one kind of competition but not others.
One of the reasons I think that this is so present in some forms of competition is that it has one long-lived, known internet repository. Adam Smargon's list was created for usenet, migrated to the web, and has been a resource in a stable location for decades (https://www.smargon.net/nicknames/). That stability means that when a writer needs the right clue, they immediately turn to the source they are familiar with, and will return to it as the need presents itself.
The guesses I can give to the situation in circuit quiz bowl all stem from how certain categories of information became anathema. Part of this comes from sports questions being limited in circuit competition, and college sports being just a small fraction of that category. After that's eliminated, unless you're talking about a particular department at a particular university (e.g., Columbia's anthropology program), most clues about colleges are about five pieces of data: Location, Nickname, Athletic Conference, Alumni, and Founder. The first is geography, the second and third sports, the fourth and fifth depend on the person(s) that can be written about. Because of these clues being grouped around different categories, the only category these can fit in a single question is general knowledge, a category that easily can be filled by many things that aren’t colleges.
Another factor which leads to it not being present is the perception that writing about a college might favor one team over another for reasons other than knowledge. Simple familiarity with a school because they are geographically close, attended an event there, or having ties to campus can all lead to an advantage on a question, and be seen not as superior knowledge by the opponent but as the accursed dumb luck. Because the circuit began with college teams these random effects which vary from game to game due to non-study factors were even higher at the founding, and people tried to eliminate the variability. This is a bit silly, to modify Branch Rickey's maxim "Luck is the residue of design" in quiz bowl, dumb luck is the residue of observation.
In televised quiz bowl, you see a greater emphasis on colleges and universities because they didn't begin with colleges, and many shows are sponsored by colleges. It also allows the writers to incorporate geography clues, or alumni clues into the game that otherwise would be too difficult to bring up. College Jeopardy! does it because their writers like to reinforce the themes of the competition to the audience, and that also allows them to write questions about nicknames, or alumni, or historical founders, and theme multiple categories as college related throughout the two-week period.
So how far into the category do we need to study for positive results? We don't need to go to the depths of the Smargon database for this, we can isolate most questions to a few categories, and from there we can collect the data from the associated fields.
For televised quiz bowl or bar trivia:
- Division I FBS Power 5 conferences (ACC, SEC, Big 10, Big 12, Pac-12)
- The Ivy League
- The service academies.
Within these, we should pay special attention to those whose name does not contain a state or a city, or is named for a particular person because those clues can be offered to lead to answers in three different directions (state, college name, founder).
Jeopardy! is likely to add these as possible answers:
- Historically Black Colleges and Universities
- All DI FBS colleges
- Members of the University Athletic Association (mostly as a special case of colleges named for a person.)
- The University of [state] and [state] State University for every US state.
- Any college or university which is the alma mater of a US President.
The last is a very specific intersection of two sets of data known to be frequently sampled. Anytime we can reasonably assume two sets of data are going to be used by writers, we should assume the intersection of that data is no less likely to be used.