[quote name=\'TLEberle\' post=\'188106\' date=\'Jun 13 2008, 12:36 AM\']
Now I'm curious. I remember reading somewhere or other that College Bowl's material was wanting, and NAQT filled the void for people who like their quiz bowl to be more brain burning, but where else would derision be derived?
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Disclaimer - I am no longer involved with NAQT, I left the group earlier this year semi-amicably.
Oh, where to begin?
Up until the mid-90s, if you played quiz bowl in college, College Bowl was your only choice. The problem became, at most, you would play three times a year -- the IM tournament, the regional tournament and the national tournament. However, if you didn't win your IM tournament, you weren't playing in the regional tournament, and if you didn't win the regional tournament, you didn't play in the national tournament. Many campuses also played their IMs as a single elimination tournament, meaning you may have played one game in the entire year. Also, the focus of College Bowl (which I'll be referring to as CBI) always was even after TV dried up that they were still a TV show -- the material lent itself to being TV friendly, even if there was no TV.
In the early 90s, in order to get more playing in, some schools started organizing tournaments. These tournaments also tilted the bent of the questions away from more of a current-events/accessible-to-all to more rigorous college level of questions, plus losing the elements of questions that made them more TV friendly, like using word play or tangential information to get answers. Great for the players who were rote memorizers, but no longer compelling TV, or even fake TV. This eventually led to the "ACF"-style of play, which was pretty much hard core classics, science, literature and history with a smattering of fine arts and nothing else.
However, there was still a group of players that wanted some of the ACF-innovations but not the obscurity. That led to the formation of NAQT, which at the time was supposed to be a middle ground. Plus a fourth organization, Colonial's own TRASH - which got rid of those pesky history and classics questions and kept it to mass media and sports. So you now had this overwhelming level of choice, all of it except for CBI with a heavy player and recent player-led leadership.
CBI decided to consider all of this a threat, not in the competition of the game, but in the idea that one of these other formats might get on TV first. They threatened tournaments with lawsuits. They clung fast to their geographical regional system where one group has most of the Ivy League battling for one spot in their national tournament while Portland Community College represented the Northwest. They required teams to have a university employee as a chaperone. They bullied players, they treated them like children and it cost a school four-figures in entry fees to play if they advanced to the regionals. They began to slowly lose their voice in the marketplace. The winner of the 1997 championship (UVa) immediately declared they were no longer playing CBI. Other schools were leaving left and right. They became a running joke in the circuit.
As this was going on, the other formats (NAQT, ACF and TRASH) answer set gradually crept to be more difficult, to the point today that they are very difficult for a novice and the barrier of entry became high. Teams started dropping all over the place, because getting new players is incredibly difficult. There may be less than half the number of players than there were 10 years ago. The marketplace shrunk. The college-run tournament with the exception of questions in the ACF-style have disappeared. The archetype player is now pretty much an ACF-partisan, NAQT is now-somewhat derided as being CBI-like because the material is more accessible while CBI is just considered a lost cause. Why ask questions about Arthur Miller when you can ask questions about Antonin Artuad, instead?
With that derision in the marketplace causing a lack of players, somebody had to lose. And that loser was CBI. They had way too much overhead -- they had a staff in L.A. still waiting for their big TV break. If they had dropped the TV dream years ago, moved to a cheaper location, dropped their attitude and offered differentiating product, they could have limped on longer. NAQT's only sustainable market is the high school game, the college game is not profitable/break-even. ACF is entirely volunteer.
It's not a happy day in quiz bowl land. For their faults, I really enjoyed my time as a player and I wish that there was still room for them. To finally get this to game shows, some of your great game show players of recent history (Ken Jennings, Kevin Olmstead, Brad Rutter) were trained on CBI-style questions.
--Mike