Greatest Upsets in Quizbowl History

[dtaylor4]

Does it count as an upset if it's on substandard questions? If so, Dunlap v. Stevenson at IHSA State this year.

Doesn't count if the packet itself won.

[Lighthouse Expert Elinor DeWire]

On a smaller note, McGill upsetting Columbia to make the top bracket also deserves a mention.

I'm glad to be a member of the worst top bracket team ever. We've always had a good matchup against Columbia for some reason. Also having the original 3rd seed missing their best player helped.

There's a 6th possibility here: Your team is better than the stats (PPB) indicate, so what is viewed as an upset is not necessarily an upset.

So, the standard stat used to compare teams, especially from different reasons is PPB, because 1) the correlation between PPB and quizbowl performance is pretty good and 2) there just isn't a better stat out there. However, games are not won by converting bonuses, games are won by getting tossups.

This seems to be a trend with us too, looking back at last year's ICT and 2015 CO. Derek's really good. The rest of us aren't, leaving way too many bonuses unanswered even though he can get the majority of the tossups in a game.

[CPiGuy]

I'll PM you with specifics. I would post the specific instances of this story here, but the set is not clear -- so I'll definitely do that once Terrapin is clear.

Ike

I *think* Terrapin is clear now?

Terrapin is definitely clear now, and the set posted. (I was reminded of this by Will Alston's mention of said tournament in the player poll thread).

[bretthogan43]

Back on the 4th of March of this year, a bunch of hicks from Fairview kept pace with Alabama "Small School" state champs East Lawrence and eventually beat them on the last tossup. Might not mean much to anyone else but I think it qualifies as an "upset" and deserves a mention.

[rylltraka]

Chicago Open 2012, Dharma and Greg Bums over In Soviet Russia, Tournament Edits You. A team of myself, Mik Larsen, Alex Gerten, and Tirth Patel, which went 7-9 over the course of the tournament, beat Jonathan Magin, Bruce Arthur, Will Butler, and Jerry Vinokurov, who went 13-3 and, had they won, would have been in a final against a team they had already beaten.

In terms of the varieties of upset that have been discussed in this thread, this game definitely had the "advantage-killing neg" and "niche topic comes up for underdog" motifs in play. ISRTEY suffered four negs to our none, none of their players had a breakout scoring rush (Magin had 40), and we hung around off vulched tossups despite poor bonus conversion (they answered 8 w/15 PPB, us 9 w/11). Stephen had been doing most of the buzzing for us, and I, having an up-and-down tournament, had been doing my best impression of a rock.

We're down 15 going into the final tossup, I believe, and it happens to be on the Watts Towers, a tourist attraction in south LA that I had visited the previous year, and where I'd watched the informative video in the visitor center (and thus knew every single clue in power). It was probably the one TU in the tournament that I could have answered before anyone else in the field.

[AGoodMan]

Obviously not as big or important as many most other matches mentioned here, but at the 2016 ATROPHY at Northern Illinois University (run on BHSAT), my high school team, Wheaton Warrenville South, beat the Rockford Auburn A team 390-315. That Auburn team featured 3 All-State players (Cole Timmerwilke, Ethan Strombeck, and Henry Roe), and Cole was also All-World and #3 scorer at HSNCT (in ppg and powers). We didn't even hit 20ppb on the set (Auburn hit 23+), and Auburn also had almost double the number of powers that we did (29 vs. 56). We just hit a good packet that round and played conservatively.

[naan/steak-holding toll]

Columbia smacking down Michigan (with an assist by 6 Michigan negs) is worth mentioning here. Indeed, Columbia's 4th place performance at Nationals is highly commendable, made possible as it was by key victories over Chicago and Michigan. I am glad that this was evidently incorporated by this year's voters into the team poll.

[The Ununtiable Twine]

It goes without saying that we have to give a shout out to high school freshman (and one of my former TQBA campers) Eshaan Vakil of Clark HS for defeating two-time defending HSNCT champion Hunter at NSC this weekend. Judging by the morning stats, Hunter put up outstanding numbers in the prelims, as no other match was decided by fewer than 300 points in their favor. Eshaan went a very respectable 3-4 in a reasonably difficult pool. However none of that matters as history was made!

[ryanrosenberg]

It goes without saying that we have to give a shout out to high school freshman (and one of my former TQBA campers) Eshaan Vakil of Clark HS for defeating two-time defending HSNCT champion Hunter at NSC this weekend. Judging by the morning stats, Hunter put up outstanding numbers in the prelims, as no other match was decided by fewer than 300 points in their favor. Eshaan went a very respectable 3-4 in a reasonably difficult pool. However none of that matters as history was made!

A freshman from Nevada playing solo beat a national champion. Let that sink in.

[Zerowaltz]

https://www.naqt.com/stats/tournament/g ... _id=933587

Who Would Win?

An incredible team with camaraderie, balance, and synergy who would go on to place 2nd at HSNCT and 3rd at PACE NSC and beat many other top ranked teams

OR

some ama ois

[Dominator]

some ama ois

(1) Congratulations on your victory.
(2) 20 tossups heard?! And 2 of those didn't even need a bonus?!?! I'd have been so tilted!

[AKKOLADE]

https://www.naqt.com/stats/tournament/g ... _id=933587

Who Would Win?

An incredible team with camaraderie, balance, and synergy who would go on to place 2nd at HSNCT and 3rd at PACE NSC and beat many other top ranked teams

OR

some ama ois

I'm not real sure that HSNCT's 35th best team in PP20TUH beating the 7th is a historic upset.

[btressler]

My favorite head-scratching result is Nittany Bowl 1994. The Princeton team that won the tournament took its only two losses to low-ranked opponents in the prelims. (Yes, I was on the Dickinson team that caused one of those defeats, and I can't believe the results are still on the Internet.)

This Delaware team was not originally offered a berth for ICT Division II, got off the waitlist, and ended up finishing 4th.

[Woody]

The 2008 Class B Michigan State Championship. It was run on KMO/Academic Hallmark Questions, which is a significant part of what led to this happening. Also relevant is that the matches were timed, and if the timer ran out, the game was over -- no finishing the cycle or any of that. 2008 was a weird time.

Detroit Country Day enters the tournament the heavy favorites. Double elimination tournament. DeWitt went undefeated until the championship, Detroit Country Day narrowly lost their first-round match to Corunna (likely because Corunna's league at the time was run on KMO/Academic Hallmark, so they were more familiar with the rhythm of the questions), then DCDS absolutely dominated the Elimination Bracket.

First game of the championship, Detroit Country Day defeats DeWitt 910 - 385. Absolutely brutal game, we never got any momentum and never stood a chance. We went out into the hallway after the game and got a good pep talk, then went back in to see what we could do.

Second game, first half: our captain, Mattie Bogner, got off to a huge start. DCDS made a few negs, and starting fighting with each other. They were definitely off their rhythm, and we seized upon the opportunity to have a pretty firm lead at halftime.

Second game, second half: DCDS regrouped at halftime and came roaring out of the gate. Our lead eroded little by little, until they took a 10 point lead with 43 seconds left on the clock. Next question starts, I heard "This wealthy Italian merchant family", reflex buzz and shout (literally shout, I had a LOOOT of adrenaline going) "de Medici!" which gets us 10 points, then we draw out the 10 point bonus as best we can. There's maybe 12, 15 seconds left on the clock, we're up by 10 points. The next question is a "finish this line of poetry" question, before it even gets to the point where it's really possible to know what line they're actually going to look for, with about 5 seconds left on the clock, Mattie Bogner buzzes in and says "I... I don't have an answer", taking the neg and stalling out the clock for a 5 point victory, 735-730.

My absolute favorite quiz bowl memory, as we had a long-standing rivalry with DCDS. We occasionally beat them on NAQT questions, but they were overall the better team for the majority of my high school career. But when it really counted, we managed to beat them and take the 2008 State Championship.

[nsb2]

It was on a terrible set, but surely Dunlap's win over Stevenson at IHSA State in 2017 has to be up there