Perhaps I should start by defining what I understand to be the defining characteristics of "good quizbowl":
- Pyramidal tossups
- Bonuses (if used) with graded difficulty structure. (In the three-part case, this would be an easy, a medium, and a hard part for each bonus, though in principle bonuses need not be tripartite, nor even need they be used at all.)
- More generally, questions designed to reward teams/players with greater knowledge rather than only those with greater buzzer speed (though buzzer speed cannot be truly eliminated as a factor)
- Audience-appropriate topic-selection and difficulty, both within questions and across all the questions used (with acknowledgment that perfect difficulty control isn't realistic)
- Tournament formats designed to give teams many opportunities to display their knowledge, avoid perverse incentives, clearly and meaningfully identify a winner (and preferably other places), and preferably have some forgiveness for flukes
- Rules and officials that respect players and all other participants, and maintain the focus on the principles of competition mentioned above
Anyway, getting back to the problem of the phrase "good quizbowl", the best alternative I have so far is "pyramidal quizbowl". But, as is obvious from the second through sixth points above, "good quizbowl" entails so much more. Perhaps we could say that the phrase "pyramidal quizbowl" is synecdoche for all of those points, but I think when trying to educate people on "good quizbowl", it is better not to use a phrase that (even if only naïvely) implies a limitation.
So, has anyone found a phrase that at least roughly conveys those ideas — or at least doesn't suggest it's only concerned with one of them — and also doesn't have a tendency to turn off listeners who aren't yet convinced of the benefits?