The Quizbowl Resource Center

For those unfamiliar, this is like Survivor only without whatever happens on Survivor that doesn't involve voting people off. You can see an example of this game format in my NBA thread.

I asked bored people in IRC a group of illuminaries to help contribute to this activity, by which I mean "make this list and then give it to me so I can keep track of votes on an Excel sheet." If there's a tie, I'll either make a horrible decision or let the next vote break the tie.

Voting is NOT open - delayed until after ICT/ACF Nats

1988 Georgia Tech
1990 Chicago
1991 Tennessee
1993 Chicago
1993 Virginia
1994 Chicago
1995 Harvard
1996 Georgia Tech
1997 Chicago
1997 Harvard
1997 Virginia
1998 Stanford
1998 Virginia
1999 Chicago
1999 Maryland
2000 Chicago
2000 Illinois
2001 Chicago
2001 Michigan
2001 Michigan B
2001 Virginia
2002 Kentucky
2002 Michigan
2002 Virginia
2003 Berkeley
2003 Chicago
2003 Michigan
2004 Berkeley
2004 Chicago
2005 Chicago
2005 Michigan
2006 Berkeley
2006 Illinois
2006 Texas A&M
2007 Chicago
2008 Brown
2008 Chicago
2008 Maryland
2009 Brown
2009 Chicago
2009 Illinois
2010 Chicago
2010 Minnesota
2010 Stanford
2011 Minnesota
2011 Yale
2012 Virginia
2012 Yale
2013 Illinois
2013 Yale

I'll leave discussion open for ~2 days.

It's not the prettiest or exhaustively fair strategy, but I'm not seeing a great reason not to just start at the beginning and indiscriminately vote off every team from before circa 2005. This seems way more clear-cut than the basketball one. The game was totally different, and those teams just straight-up weren't as good. Unless of course we're going to get really into the idea of "you can only compare teams against their contemporaries," in which case I encourage all those old enough to have observed quizbowl in 1988 to regale us with tales of the olden days.

are illuminaries like a sweet glowing version of luminaries

Just for fun, another way of representing those teams in the Fantastic Fifty:

Kouign Amann wrote:It's not the prettiest or exhaustively fair strategy, but I'm not seeing a great reason not to just start at the beginning and indiscriminately vote off every team from before circa 2005.

People should look at the roster of 2004 Chicago and then seriously consider if they want to vote against that.

Ukonvasara wrote:are illuminaries like a sweet glowing version of luminaries

i didn't want to spoil it, but yes.

bt_green_warbler wrote:

Kouign Amann wrote:It's not the prettiest or exhaustively fair strategy, but I'm not seeing a great reason not to just start at the beginning and indiscriminately vote off every team from before circa 2005.

People should look at the roster of 2004 Chicago and then seriously consider if they want to vote against that.

Hell, who'd vote against the 04 Berkeley team there?

And as an example of how the QB Wiki still needs work: http://www.qbwiki.com/wiki/2002_ACF_Nationals

I'd vote off every pre-Yaphe team first.

Grams's Go-Go Boots wrote:

bt_green_warbler wrote:

Kouign Amann wrote:It's not the prettiest or exhaustively fair strategy, but I'm not seeing a great reason not to just start at the beginning and indiscriminately vote off every team from before circa 2005.

People should look at the roster of 2004 Chicago and then seriously consider if they want to vote against that.

Hell, who'd vote against the 04 Berkeley team there?

And as an example of how the QB Wiki still needs work: http://www.qbwiki.com/wiki/2002_ACF_Nationals

I'm gonna claim that having included "circa" allows me to retroactively cover myself here. Obviously, attention must be paid to specific teams as we get nearer the present, but the pre-2000 guys can clearly go, right?

Are we just talking A-teams here? Because I'll note (only somewhat in self-interest) that the Chicago team of aught-nine won ACF, ICT, and Div II ICT, with Chicago B pulling some pretty sweet upsets.

It's kind of odd to see how context or happenstance results in some teams making this list. The 2009 Stanford team didn't win any titles (and also lost to Nolan Esser), but on paper it could be better than the 2010 team, seeing how it has Kevin Koai. Unfortunately, it took some upsets and then ran into the excellent Brown team.

One question I have is how to consider the rosters for these teams. Should 2009 Brown for instance include Eric, who didn't play either national? Also, how are we comparing these teams? Is it if they all met at the peaks of their players and played a game? Or more historical dominance? Certainly it's likely that some of the older teams would have not done well at what we consider good quizbowl today, but we don't know that and they should also get some credit for excelling at proto-historical time. There's also some pretty strong players hidden in those old rosters.

I'll also note that 2007 UIUC was pretty beastly if I remember correctly.

Grams's Go-Go Boots wrote:And as an example of how the QB Wiki still needs work: http://www.qbwiki.com/wiki/2002_ACF_Nationals

Well, luckily http://www.qbwiki.com/wiki/ACF_Nationals still has some info on it.

The first post, like, really really needs some rosters and more information.

Cheynem wrote:It's kind of odd to see how context or happenstance results in some teams making this list. The 2009 Stanford team didn't win any titles (and also lost to Nolan Esser), but on paper it could be better than the 2010 team, seeing how it has Kevin Koai. Unfortunately, it took some upsets and then ran into the excellent Brown team.

This is not exactly what happened. Stanford narrowly beat us in the prelims, but we never had another chance to play them because the playoff brackets were crossover. In the end, we ended up with the best PPG against a common field out of three teams with the same record, which meant that Chicago and Stanford had a one-game play-in to see who would face us in the final.

Also, as Jeff says, that Chicago team in 2004 was crazy good.

Oh, whoops, I was transposing Chicago and Brown in the three way scenario at the end. Sorry about that.

Maybe this is too much meta-discussion, but I'm wondering what the criteria for evaluation are supposed to be. Part of the problem is that 1997 Virginia has nontrivial commonality with 2010 Stanford, so how do we pick between these teams? Performance relative to the field, all-time player greatness, team transposed to modern-day quizbowl?

fourplustwo wrote:The first post, like, really really needs some rosters and more information.

hey look at all this free time i got

Grams's Go-Go Boots wrote:

fourplustwo wrote:The first post, like, really really needs some rosters and more information.

hey look at all this free time i got

how do i used qbwiki

I've probably said this before, but I'll say it again. Obviously, the difficulty, consistency, and quality of quizbowl questions changed drastically between the first stage of my playing career (mid-'90s through around 2001) and the second stage (2004-2010). It is understandable that if your only exposure to the "pre-modern" phase of the game is through glancing at old packets, you would jump to the conclusion that teams of that era were a joke by contemporary standards.

In my view, however, that conclusion would be a mistake. From the perspective of someone who played at both tournaments, the actual experience of competing at ACF nationals in 1997 was basically the same as competing at ACF nationals in 2010. I've explained elsewhere my views on what could be called the phenomenology of high-level quizbowl competition, and what sets the best players and teams apart--I think those phenomena were essentially constant throughout both eras.

I will say that if the criterion is "how good a given team was vis-a-vis its contemporaries," then it's my opinion that the 1999 Chicago team was the best of my career. I don't know what kind of records exist, but my recollection is that the A team that year essentially went undefeated, including at both ACF nats and ICT. In my (possibly biased) view, that team was head and shoulders above the other teams of the time in a way that no other collegiate team of my career was separated from its competition.

Birdofredum Sawin wrote:I've explained elsewhere my views on what could be called the phenomenology of high-level quizbowl competition, and what sets the best players and teams apart

I would be interested to read such an explanation. Where would that be found?

Most recently, I think, I discussed the subject in connection with the revised Martin Faber rankings (or some mysterious person known as "A" did it, but I endorse his reasoning). I believe I've made similar posts over the years, but I couldn't tell you where.

Voting will start tonight with the NBA elimination game.

In 13 days, this year's nationals will be concluded. Maybe we can hold off until then? It's not outside the realm of possibility that a new contender will appear by that point.

The field is full, sir.

Cheynem wrote:The field is full, sir.

There are some very obvious choices to knock off the list if the nationals this year churn out another contender.

They can be the first seed in the next round of Quizbowl Survivor in another 25 years or so.

Renesmee LaHotdog Voight wrote:In 13 days, this year's nationals will be concluded. Maybe we can hold off until then? It's not outside the realm of possibility that a new contender will appear by that point.

20 days, unless part of the grand plan is for Chicago to lose when everyone on our team thinks ACF is a week later than it really is.

Mewto55555 wrote:20 days, unless part of the grand plan is for Chicago to lose when everyone on our team thinks ACF is a week later than it really is.

Math class is tough, let's go shopping.

Eh, we can wait until after this year's nationals, why not.

I suggest we replace the 88 GT or one of the 90s teams with 2014 UVA.

It could be aesthetically pleasing to remove 1988 Georgia Tech so that every team is from the 1990's on up.

Also because no one will have anything useful or interesting to say about 1988 Georgia Tech!

Ukonvasara wrote:Also because no one will have anything useful or interesting to say about 1988 Georgia Tech!

Well, some of us are old enough to have played against them. If you need to get this year's UVA in (hint: you probably do), I would suggest removing one of the 90s teams.

Regardless of the final decision of what to do with this year's team, I'm not starting this until May.

'88 Georgia Tech? What do you want to know about them?
--The smoldering, competitive stare of superstar Jim Dendy?
--The irrepressible smugness of Scott "Scooter" Gillespie? He of the Barkley-esque back porch and prominent forward-leaning gait?
--Uh, Al Whited? I think he was still playing then. Or at least he was around.
--That other guy? With the glasses and the hair?

I remember Dendy wrote a packet (or the whole tournament?) on which my Florida team was playing a Tech team led by Gillespie when Gillespie negged a TU on Gustav Holst, causing Dendy to loudly drop a portfolio on the floor and storm out. We lost by a lot, but it remains one of my favorite memories of a match against Tech.

And yeah, they were pretty dominant in their era, but we're (or rather, y'all are) eventually just going to rehash a lot of the arguments from the basketball thread here: How do you compare eras? What about the poor quality of questions then? Etc, etc.

Since this won't start until May, I have a much more radical suggestion, then:

I don't want to spend like 6+ months on this like the NBA one (jesus. christ.), and there isn't that much interesting to say about most of these teams (and if we want to say interesting things, just run a nice round-robin discussion of various-pre modern teams somewhere else).

I would like to arbitrarily start our time period at 1999 and cap this at 20-30 teams. This way it doesn't take forever and we get to the interesting part immediately.

Cody wrote:I would like to arbitrarily start our time period at 1999 and cap this at 20-30 teams. This way it doesn't take forever and we get to the interesting part immediately.

Hadn't Yaphe already accumulated something like two nats titles before 1999? I'm not sure that's the best year to start.

For the purposes of this exercise, do we really care how good Yaphe was before 1999? Did he get worse when he moved to Chicago? Did he get worse teammates? The answer to both is no & thus it is mostly irrelevant. The only reason I arbitrarily chose 1999 and not later is so we can include the undefeated 1999 Chicago team.

Cody wrote:I don't want to spend like 6+ months on this like the NBA one (jesus. christ.)

kobe

Dr. Loki Skylizard, Thoracic Surgeon wrote:kobe

1999 Chicago.

:)

Cody wrote:For the purposes of this exercise, do we really care how good Yaphe was before 1999? Did he get worse when he moved to Chicago? Did he get worse teammates? The answer to both is no & thus it is mostly irrelevant. The only reason I arbitrarily chose 1999 and not later is so we can include the undefeated 1999 Chicago team.

Well if we're including the 50 best teams ever, yes we certainly do care, or at least enough not to just say "oh let's cap it at 1999 and not even think about anything before then," especially because Yaphe himself was part of that 1999 Chicago team.

Edit: I won't say any more because I've exhausted my knowledge of the topic. Hopefully someone who was around then could shed some more light on this.

Cody wrote:

Dr. Loki Skylizard, Thoracic Surgeon wrote:kobe

1999 Chicago.

:)

Really, I'm okay running something that'll take that long, though it'll "only" be 3 months. It'll be a fun summer game.

I'm not sure why people are so eager to curtail discussion of older quizbowl. I, for one, am interested to hear about these older teams. Perhaps some of the elder statesmen among us could contact some of the leading lights of 1990s quizbowl and ask if they'd be interested in telling some stories about these pre-modern teams on the forum. Even hearing about these teams from the likes of Chris and Brian would be extremely interesting to me.

Yo so old chris borglum

yo momma so old she negged tossups involving chopsticks

Even hearing about these teams from the likes of Chris and Brian would be extremely interesting to me.

"Even"? "The likes of"??? Translation: "Even if we have to settle for the kind of low-grade crap proffered by these tedious stink-nozzles (sorry, Brian!), I guess it would be slightly better than nothing."

But hey, validation!

Why don't people go ahead and talk about older teams some?

To put it another way, I would find it fascinating to hear more about these teams, but I'm not sure how that makes voting any more easier.

theMoMA wrote:I'm not sure why people are so eager to curtail discussion of older quizbowl. I, for one, am interested to hear about these older teams. Perhaps some of the elder statesmen among us could contact some of the leading lights of 1990s quizbowl and ask if they'd be interested in telling some stories about these pre-modern teams on the forum. Even hearing about these teams from the likes of Chris and Brian would be extremely interesting to me.

I have no objection to hearing about the older teams, which is why I suggested a different discussion for them. Since 95% of us have nothing to contribute to discussion of pre-2000-ish quizbowl, it's kind of dry from a discussion POV and can't really aid voting much (not even considering that none of them can really come near the GOAT).