Home Field Advantage Matters in Quiz Bowl?

[ninjaluc79]

Hi everyone!

So I just thought, what if a QB league has a head-to-head format with home fields and road trips? How will it work?

Because from my experience, most if not all quizzers play QB on the road, and there are only few leagues that allow for home field advantage against only one team.

In our city-wide quiz, for example, defending champ gets home field advantage for the year, which means all the other participating schools go to the defending champ's school for the contest.

So what if there's a league with home vs road battles?

Has anyone experimented doing this on the intra-school level (i.e., each class has their own classroom for a home field)?

P.S. I also thought of a new buzzer QB game which is played by a team of 3-4 (with 2-6 reserve players), has 3 or 4 10-minute periods, 10-20 seconds to answer a question after it's being read, 3 points awarded if answered within half the time (5-10 seconds), 2 points awarded after 5-10 seconds has passed or the first wrong answer, whichever comes first.

P.P.S. My proposed tourney format is this: Double round robin for all participants in the regular season so all teams get a chance to play each other both on their home fields and on the road, single-elimination tournament playoff.

So for a league with 7 teams, double round robin nets each team 12 games for the regular season, the top 4 qualify for the playoffs and are seeded according to their rank.

Best-of-3 playoff Semifinal: 1 vs 4, 2 vs 3 (higher seeds have HFA for Games 1 and 3)
Best-of-5 playoff Final: 1-4 winner vs 2-3 winner (higher seeds have HFA for Games 1, 2, and 5)

[Skepticism and Animal Feed]

I have to imagine that the advantage from using your own set of buzzers, or the advantage of having a familiar moderator read the questions, is millions of times more important than the location of the game.

[alexdz]

My high school team used to play home-and-away duals against the other teams in our conference. That is, we played an eight game conference season: we would drive to Hallsville and they would in turn come to us for our other match against them, same going for each of the other three schools in the conference. At the very end of the season, we started playing a tournament in addition to the duals, and that rotated hosts every year according to a schedule set up by the activities directors.

So, yes, a league with that model has existed. It no longer works that way (thankfully) but it has been done.

That said, I agree with Bruce.

[ninjaluc79]

I figured as much. It is true that familiarity actually matters more than the actual location, but at least the home field can give you that so the mods and buzzers don't have to leave the school for that home game.

I asked the question because I'm planning to make a mini-QB league for my old high school in the future. So maybe any tweaks to make it more interesting in our area at least?

[JamesIV]

At a college level, at least, I believe there is something to a "home field advantage" - but not anything to do with a particular classroom or building.

A team that has to travel to a tournament must get up far, far earlier than a team hosting it - when Yale goes to Penn, for example, we have to be up at around 4am. By the time you get to the afternoon rounds, especially given the irregular schedule of meals that quizbowl is wont to feature, those extra hours of sleep start to make a difference. I don't think there's really any way of fixing this, other than a good faith effort to space mirrors in the most efficient way possible.

[ether a go-go]

One thing to keep in mind while designing a league schedule is that, assuming logistics allow for it, it is better to play more than one match in a single day. Some leagues have four teams all go to one school, where they play a three match round robin. It's even better if you can get everybody together on a Saturday and have everybody play 10 matches.

[ninjaluc79]

One thing to keep in mind while designing a league schedule is that, assuming logistics allow for it, it is better to play more than one match in a single day. Some leagues have four teams all go to one school, where they play a three match round robin. It's even better if you can get everybody together on a Saturday and have everybody play 10 matches.

And then what, have each coach (yes, HSQB teams in our country are school-regulated) prepare a packet for each of the other teams?

Say, in a regular season series between Yale and Penn, both teams would get to answer Yale's packet first, then Penn's. Then Yale has Harvard for the next opponent, so both teams will get to answer Harvard's packet first, then Yale's. And so on.

So it IS important that the mod in charge of each school makes sure that his/her packet shall be kept secret even from their team until the day of the competition.

This way, logistics would be less of a problem. After all, it's the familiarity that gives each team HFA for QBs.

[ether a go-go]

Where the questions come from is another matter. You should only have schools write packets for tournaments if there is some consensus over question quality and there is somebody willing to serve as editor. Otherwise, it makes sense to have the questions come from a single source that is known to write good questions. Keep in mind that question quality is the most important factor in determining whether or not quizbowl is a worthwhile use of your time.

If you want to have teams supply questions, then the schedule should have byes for the teams. This often works well with an odd number of teams. For example, with 9 teams on a Saturday, you can have 9 rounds of matches, with each team playing 8 matches and sitting out during 1 round. When the team is not playing, its questions get used. You can do the same sort of thing for weekdays, though the matches get spread out over several days.

[tintinnabulation]

Our high school area league has around twenty teams and once a week, four teams go to one of five host schools to play three matches (well, six, if you count JV.) The host schools change every week; everybody has one or two turns.The questions are provided by some really mysterious, bad source but are uniform across all sites and all rounds. We participate in another, smaller league, and they use basically the same format, but the questions come from Questions Galore.

In terms of a home field advantage, I think the only advantage is familiarity. You're familiar with the rooms, the chairs you're sitting in (you are responsible for setting them up, so if they're uncomfortable, it's the freshmen's fault), and the moderators (since the host schools supply the moderators--teachers and sometimes parents.) Our school is an anomaly, but more people come to see us play when we're at home.