College Bowl
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- For postseason college football games, see Bowl game.
College Bowl is a format of college-level quizbowl run and operated by College Bowl Company, Incorporated.
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[edit] History
Originating in a USO activity created by Canadian Don Reid for World War II soldiers, the game was developed into a radio show by Reid and John Moses. Grant Tinker, later President of NBC and MTM Enterprises, got his start as an assistant on the show.
The first College Quiz Bowl match was played on NBC radio on October 10, 1953, when Northwestern University defeated Columbia University 135-60. 26 episodes ran the first season. Winning teams received $500 grants for their school. Good Housekeeping magazine became the sponsor for the 1954-55 season, and a short third season in the autumn of 1955 finished the run. The most dominant team was the University of Minnesota, which had teams appear in 23 of the 68 broadcast matches. The 1953-55 series had a powerful appeal because it used remote broadcasts; each team was located at their own college where they were cheered on by their wildly enthusiastic classmates. The effect was akin to listening to a football game, but this type of excitement evaporated in later versions, in which both teams competed in the same room.
Though a pilot was shot in the spring of 1955, the game did not move to television until 1959. As G.E. College Bowl with General Electric as the primary sponsor, the show ran on CBS from 1959 to 1962, and moved back to NBC for 1962 through 1970. Allen Ludden was the original host, but left to do Password full time in 1962. Robert Earle was moderator for the rest of the run. The norm developed in the Ludden-Earle era of undefeated teams retiring after winning five games. For example, Lafayette College retired undefeated in Fall 1962 after beating the University of California Berkeley for its fifth victory.
The show licensed and spun-off three other academic competitions in the U.S.: Alumni Fun, which appeared on all three major TV networks in the 1960's; Bible Bowl, which has evolved into at least three separate national competitions; and High School Bowl, which is still broadcast in some local TV markets.
In 1970 modern invitational tournaments began with the Southeastern Invitational Tournament, and the circuit expanded through the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. These tournaments increasingly made various modifications to the College Bowl format, and came to be known as quiz bowl. Earlier invitational tournaments, such as the "Syraquiz" at Syracuse University, had occurred in the 1950s and 1960s.
The game returned to radio from 1979 to 1982, hosted by Art Fleming, and has made two more television appearances: 1984 on NBC, hosted by Pat Sajak and 1987 on Disney Channel, hosted by Dick Cavett. The University of Minnesota won both iterations. In 1976, the program became affiliated with the Association of College Unions International (ACUI) [1], which continues to promote the competition as a non-broadcast event after the demise of the radio and television experiments.
CBI retains the ACUI contract, and administers the Honda Campus All-Star Challenge at historically black colleges and universities. Although CBI does not sponsor any part of the quiz bowl circuit apart from its own tournaments, it continues as a viable company with its own, separate audience. At many schools that participate in College Bowl, the student union helps pay for and organize the required intramural tournament open to all students at that institution and then may help send a selected team to College Bowl regional, and possibly national, competition as that school's designated representative. This funding model is quite different from that of many quizbowl teams at other schools, many of whom receive funding as clubs from student council sources and then use that money to pay for tournament fees and travel expenses of their choosing.
A British version of the televised College Bowl competition was launched as University Challenge in 1962. The program, presented by Bamber Gascoigne, produced by Granada Television and broadcast across the ITV network, was very popular and ran until it was taken off the air in 1987. In 1994 the show was resurrected by the BBC with Jeremy Paxman as the new quiz master. The programme remains very popular in Britain.
In the 1990s with the rise of the Academic Competition Federation and National Academic Quiz Tournaments, both with their own national championships, a number of schools (such as the University of Maryland, the University of Chicago, both former national champions, and recent runner up Georgia Tech) "de-affiliated" from College Bowl. Factors which contributed to this process included, among other issues, eligibility rules for College Bowl (which limited the number of graduate students who could compete and required a minimum courseload), higher participation costs for College Bowl relative to these other formats, and disagreements regarding the quality and difficulty of the questions used in College Bowl competitions.
[edit] Criticism
In the 1987 and 1988 regional tournaments, College Bowl was accused of recycling questions from previous tournaments, thereby possibly compromising the integrity of results[2] (questions for tournaments need to be new for all teams involved, or certain teams could have a competitive advantage from having heard some questions previously). The 1987 National Tournament, on the Disney Channel, saw additional controversy, as a number of protested matches proved to strain the television format. In addition, the company, especially in the early 1990s, attempted to collect licensing fees based on copyright and trade dress claims from invitational tournaments that employed formats that it claimed were similar to College Bowl, and threatened to not allow schools that failed to pay these fees to compete in College Bowl events. As it was, the company's intellectual property claims were never tested in court and these events along with the growing Internet community of quiz bowl players led to an explosion of teams, tournaments, and formats.
[edit] Top Four Finishers of CBI National Championship Tournament (1977-2006)
| Year | Host | Champion | 2nd place | 3rd place | 4th place |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1978 | University of Miami | Stanford | Yale | Cornell | Oberlin College |
| 1979 | University of Miami | Davidson College | Harvard | Oberlin College | Cornell |
| 1980 | Washington University in St. Louis | Fresno St. | Washington University in St. Louis | MIT | Washington St. |
| 1981 | Marshall | University of Maryland | Davidson | Marshall | Michigan St. |
| 1982 | New York City | UNC-Chapel Hill | Rice | UW-Madison | Vassar |
| 1984 | Ohio St. | University of Minnesota | Washington University in St. Louis | Princeton | Vassar |
| 1986 | Georgia Institute of Technology | UW-Madison | Princeton | Georgia Institute of Technology | Utah |
| 1987 | Orlando, Florida | University of Minnesota | Georgia Institute of Technology | NC State | Western Connecticut State University |
| 1988 | University of Illinois at Chicago | NC State | Emory | Princeton | Kent St. |
| 1989 | College of DuPage | University of Minnesota | Georgia Institute of Technology | Kent St. | George Washington University |
| 1990 | University of Minnesota | University of Chicago | MIT | George Washington University | Rice |
| 1991 | University of Illinois at Chicago | Rice | Cornell | University of Minnesota | University of Wisconsin |
| 1992 | George Washington University | MIT | Stanford | University of Pennsylvania | Cornell |
| 1993 | USC | University of Virginia | University of Michigan | University of Chicago | Harvard |
| 1994 | University of Florida | University of Chicago | University of Virginia | Brigham Young University | George Washington University |
| 1995 | University of Akron | Harvard | University of Chicago | University of Michigan | Brigham Young University |
| 1996 | Arizona St. | University of Michigan | University of Virginia | Princeton | Cornell |
| 1997 | Montclair St. | University of Virginia | Harvard | University of Oklahoma | University of Chicago |
| 1998 | University of Texas at Dallas | University of Michigan | Cornell | Stanford | Chicago |
| 1999 | University of Florida | University of Chicago | University of Michigan | University of Minnesota | Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University |
| 2000 | Bentley College | University of Michigan | University of Arkansas | University of Chicago | Williams College |
| 2001 | Cal St. Los Angeles | University of Michigan | University of Chicago | UT-Austin | Cornell |
| 2002 | Kansas St. | University of Michigan | UCLA | University of Florida | University of Chicago |
| 2003 | University of Pennsylvania | University of Chicago | University of Florida | University of Rochester | UCLA |
| 2004 | Auburn University at Montgomery | University of Minnesota | University of Michigan | University of Florida | Georgetown |
| 2005 | University of Washington | University of Minnesota | University of Rochester | Stanford | Truman St. |
| 2006 | University of Hartford | UCLA | University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign | Washington University in St. Louis | University of Minnesota |
[edit] Reference
Nasr, Carol (1969) The College Bowl Quiz Book. Doubleday, New York.
