Matt Weiner wrote:But, money has to come from somewhere. My point is that Illinois and other states that sponsor all-star teams need to take that money and just send their state championship teams to the real nationals.
Note that my team, Auburn, the state champions this year went to NAQT and PACE. Also note it is not a totally free trip for Team IL, but it is substantially (and generously) subsidized by the IHSSBCA. Finally note that Siva and I from said state championship team also attended PAC.
I have very mixed feelings about Panasonic.
First, I am absolutely biased by the fact that I got a cheap trip to Disney World, and for 3 rounds of coloring and calculating and chance, got a nice chuck of change.
There are several things I enjoyed about this tournament. I like that they spend a lot of time giving out free stuff and bending over backwards for the students. At least their hearts are in the right place. They also give us a lot of time to have fun with each other. While seeing everyone shoved in the halls at NAQT and chatting here and there at PACE, Panasonic does give you ample time to meet other teams, have meals together, practice with each other, play outside, etc. This is nice sometimes. I also appreciated that they had lots of judges on hand for every round. Knowing that at least here, there wouldn't be issues like having to throw out a question due to the math answer being incorrect. They also take care of challenges fairly, in my opinion, allowing students to explain why they believe the protest should be upheld. Better than Chip who calls his "Science expert" and bans anyone from speaking. Also I think having all-star teams is the one thing that makes this tournament more interesting. We know which schools have played the best together during the year. It's pretty hard to compare states, on the other hand. That said, their ways of choosing a team are quite varied from Academic Decathalon to simple tradition of "we go every year" to state tournaments of varying legitimacy.
Second, I think it is non-quizbowl, and they are upfront about that. I'm okay with winning a non-quizbowl national tournament. I would not be okay with winning a fake quizbowl tournament, which is what NAC is. That said, I also understand that this argument (w/e it's not quizbowl so don't worry about it) has been made to defend bad quizbowl before and has been attacked before on the grounds that it draws time and financial resources from legitimate contests (for my purposes HSNCT and NSC). I think this is totally understandable, but I'm not sure of the actually number of cases where a decent team that could have qualified for a legit Nationals decided not to go to said legit competition and instead to Panasonic because of financial issues or a scheduling conflict. I'd like to see evidence of these teams, if so.
Looking at the teams in the finals of Panasonic this year: IL included two who attended both, one only PACE, and one only NAQT; FL had one that attended NAQT; SC was Dorman, so they (almost) all were at both; KY had three at NAQT from two different schools; TN (Ezell Harding) attended neither, but I believe at least one was due to schedule conflict; California (Torrey Pines) attended NAQT. Other teams (by my estimation) who were of normal national caliber include: Ohio (Garfield Heights) who attended both NAQT and PACE; Pennsylvania (State College) who attended both; Maryland, two attended both and two attended neither. Therefore, by my count (feel free to correct me), one entire team and a handful of players representing a handful of schools who attended PACE and probably could have attended the other nationals did. This isn't enough, in my opinion, to say that it shouldn't exist. I don't think we should say that Guam or Iowa or Maine shouldn't come to this tournament because it's not quizbowl. They simply couldn't compete at PACE or NAQT.
Third, I found at this tournament the most frustration of any of the three national tournaments. I like to describe it as a three-ring circus. It uses gimmicks almost continuously (coloring, rhyming, microviewers); it gives each team next to no playing time; it uses constructed buzzer races. It is simply not possible to write a matching question that is not a buzzer race between at least two of the six teams on the first syllable of the third numbered choice. They also provide so little leeway on a blitz that it is often next to impossible to answer before that time. Finally, the superficiality in some categories (literature=titles+authors+i*character+nightmarish grammar) in opposition to the depth in others (math especially) is frustrating. Part of the superficiality must come from an underestimation of the field. They must think that we could never have heard of anyone outside the high school curriculum because they keep feeding us "Tell whether the given work was written by Flannery O'Connor or Carson McCullers" and so on. Sometimes I wanted to tear my hair out.
Fourth, I know many people have a problem with computation. I do too in regular quiz bowl. I also have a problem with cheating non-computational mathematics in a distribution because computation is so dreaded (PACE). I don't have a problem with computation in a non-quizbowl format that even eliminates the "I'll lose to some human calculator" argument by giving everyone calculators.
My final conclusion about the whole thing is that unless Panasonic decides to update, I believe it will decline into a collection of teams from places that don't have good quizbowl. I think this is an opportunity for this community that supports good quizbowl to reach out to the boonies states that don't have circuits. I think that it could be transformed into something that pushes forward for high school. There is nothing inherently wrong with their format (the 5, 10, 15 point rounds and team activities). It's all about the questions.
Mr. Riley in Illinois runs the Ultima on Panasonic formatted questions with adaptations that I think make it at least palatable to the wider quizbowl community. For instance, allowing short one liners in the 5 point {meaningless} round but replacing them by the 15-point round with pyramidal questions. Also, his matching tend to contain a harder choice in the first three so that there is a smaller chance that two teams will be buzzing on the third clue and using process of elimination to get the fourth. Instead, the better team will be able to buzz on the third choice and the worser will have to wait for the fourth choice to be able to get the three matches necessary to complete the choices.
Does anyone think that Panasonic could be open to changes? Does anyone think some teams will return with them?
@Reinstein, they did name a tournament director for next year, but I don't recall her name.