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'College Bowl' is a format of college-level quizbowl run and operated by 'College Bowl Company, Incorporated'.

Contents

History

Criticism

Top Four Finishers of CBI National Championship Tournament (1977-2007)

References

External links

History

Originating in a USO activity created by Canadian Don Reid for World War II soldiers, the game was developed into a radio show by Reid and John Moses. Grant Tinker, later President of NBC and MTM Enterprises, got his start as an assistant on the show.
The format was simple. Two four-member teams representing various colleges and universities competed; one member of each team was its captain. The game began with a "toss-up" question for ten points; the first player to buzz in got the right to answer, but if (s)he was wrong, the other team could try to answer (if a player buzzed in before the host finished reading the question and was wrong, the team was penalized five points). Answering a "toss-up" correctly earned the team the right to answer a multi-part "bonus" question worth up to thirty points; the team members could collaborate, but only the captain was allowed to actually give the answer. The game continued in this manner, and was played in halves. During halftime, the players were allowed to show a short promotional film of their school; or they might talk about career plans or whatever.
The first ''College Quiz Bowl'' match was played on NBC radio on October 10 1953, when Northwestern University defeated Columbia University 135-60. 26 episodes ran the first season. Winning teams received $500 grants for their school. ''Good Housekeeping'' magazine became the sponsor for the 1954-55 season, and a short third season in the autumn of 1955 finished the run. The most dominant team was the University of Minnesota, which had teams appear in 23 of the 68 broadcast matches. The 1953-55 series had a powerful appeal because it used remote broadcasts; each team was located at their own college where they were cheered on by their wildly enthusiastic classmates. The effect was akin to listening to a football game, but this type of excitement evaporated in later versions, in which both teams competed in the same room.
Though a pilot was shot in the spring of 1955, the game did not move to television until 1959. As ''G.E. College Bowl'' with General Electric as the primary sponsor, the show ran on CBS from 1959 to 1962, and moved back to NBC for 1962 through 1970. Allen Ludden was the original host, but left to do ''Password'' full time in 1962. Robert Earle was moderator for the rest of the run. The norm developed in the Ludden-Earle era of undefeated teams retiring after winning five games. For example, Lafayette College retired undefeated in Fall 1962 after beating the University of California Berkeley for its fifth victory, a David and Goliath event.
The show licensed and spun-off three other academic competitions in the U.S.: ''Alumni Fun'', which appeared on all three major TV networks in the 1960's; ''Bible Bowl'', which has evolved into at least three separate national competitions; and ''High School Bowl'', which is still broadcast in some local TV markets.
One of the great upsets in College Bowl history -- or indeed, in the history of any intercollegiate competition -- came on March 9, 1966 when a small women's school, Agnes Scott College, stunned Princeton University, 220-215, clinching the game on the final question. [1]
In 1970 modern invitational tournaments began with the Southeastern Invitational Tournament, and the circuit expanded through the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. These tournaments increasingly made various modifications to the College Bowl format, and came to be known as quiz bowl. Earlier invitational tournaments, such as the "Syraquiz" at Syracuse University, had occurred in the 1950s and 1960s.
The game returned to radio from 1979 to 1982, hosted by Art Fleming (the host of the original Jeopardy!, with the 1978 and 1979 national tournament semi-finals and finals appearing on syndicated television. The two champions from those years competed against teams from the UK for the "College Bowl World Championship," which were also televised; in 1978, Stanford University played a team of UK all-stars under College Bowl rules, and in 1979, Davidson College played Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge University under University Challenge rules. (The UK teams won in both years.) There have been two television appearances since then; the 1984 tournament semi-finals and finals aired on NBC, hosted by Pat Sajak (of Wheel of Fortune fame), and the entire 1987 tournament on Disney Channel, hosted by Dick Cavett. The University of Minnesota won both iterations. In 1976, the program became affiliated with the Association of College Unions International (ACUI) [2], which continues to promote the competition as a non-broadcast event after the demise of the radio and television experiments.
CBI retains the ACUI contract, and administers the Honda Campus All-Star Challenge at historically black colleges and universities. Although CBI does not sponsor any part of the quiz bowl circuit apart from its own tournaments, it continues as a viable company with its own, separate audience. At many schools that participate in College Bowl, the student union helps pay for and organize the required intramural tournament open to all students at that institution and then may help send a selected team to College Bowl regional, and possibly national, competition as that school's designated representative. This funding model is quite different from that of many quizbowl teams at other schools, many of whom receive funding as clubs from student council sources and then use that money to pay for tournament fees and travel expenses of their choosing.
A British version of the televised College Bowl competition was launched as University Challenge in 1962. The program, presented by Bamber Gascoigne, produced by Granada Television and broadcast across the ITV network, was very popular and ran until it was taken off the air in 1987. In 1994 the show was resurrected by the BBC with Jeremy Paxman as the new quiz master. The programme remains very popular in Britain.
An Irish version of the competition called Challenging Times ran between 1991 and 2002. It was sponsored by The Irish Times, and presented by Kevin Myers, then a columnist with that newspaper. National University of Ireland, Galway (NUIG) won it twice.
In the 1990s with the rise of the Academic Competition Federation and National Academic Quiz Tournaments, both with their own national championships, a number of schools (such as the University of Maryland, the University of Chicago, both former national champions, and recent runner up Georgia Tech) "de-affiliated" from College Bowl. Factors which contributed to this process included, among other issues, eligibility rules for College Bowl (which limited the number of graduate students who could compete and required a minimum courseload), higher participation costs for College Bowl relative to these other formats, and disagreements regarding the quality and difficulty of the questions used in College Bowl competitions.

Criticism

In the 1987 and 1988 regional tournaments, College Bowl was accused of recycling questions from previous tournaments, thereby possibly compromising the integrity of results[3] (questions for tournaments need to be new for all teams involved, or certain teams could have a competitive advantage from having heard some questions previously). The 1987 National Tournament, on the Disney Channel, saw additional controversy, as a number of protested matches proved to strain the television format. In addition, the company, especially in the early 1990s, attempted to collect licensing fees based on copyright and trade dress claims from invitational tournaments that employed formats that it claimed were similar to College Bowl, and threatened to not allow schools that failed to pay these fees to compete in College Bowl events. As it was, the company's intellectual property claims were never tested in court and these events along with the growing Internet community of quiz bowl players led to a great increase in teams, tournaments, and formats.

Top Four Finishers of CBI National Championship Tournament (1977-2007)

Year	Host	Champion	2nd place	3rd place	4th place
1978	University of Miami	Stanford	Yale	Cornell	Oberlin College
1979	University of Miami	Davidson College	Harvard	Oberlin College	Cornell
1980	Washington University in St. Louis	Fresno St.	Washington University in St. Louis	MIT	Washington St.
1981	Marshall	University of Maryland	Davidson	Marshall	Michigan St.
1982	New York City	UNC-Chapel Hill	Rice	UW-Madison	Vassar
1984	Ohio St.	University of Minnesota	Washington University in St. Louis	Princeton	Vassar
1986	Georgia Institute of Technology	UW-Madison	Princeton	Georgia Institute of Technology	Utah
1987	Orlando, Florida	University of Minnesota	Georgia Institute of Technology	NC State	Western Connecticut State University
1988	University of Illinois at Chicago	NC State	Emory	Princeton	Kent St.
1989	College of DuPage	University of Minnesota	Georgia Institute of Technology	Kent St.	George Washington University
1990	University of Minnesota	University of Chicago	MIT	George Washington University	Rice
1991	University of Illinois at Chicago	Rice	Cornell	University of Minnesota	University of Wisconsin
1992	George Washington University	MIT	Stanford	University of Pennsylvania	Cornell
1993	USC	University of Virginia	University of Michigan	University of Chicago	Harvard
1994	University of Florida	University of Chicago	University of Virginia	Brigham Young University	George Washington University
1995	University of Akron	Harvard	University of Chicago	University of Michigan	Brigham Young University
1996	Arizona St.	University of Michigan	University of Virginia	Princeton	Cornell
1997	Montclair St.	University of Virginia	Harvard	University of Oklahoma	University of Chicago
1998	University of Texas at Dallas	University of Michigan	Cornell	Stanford	Chicago
1999	University of Florida	University of Chicago	University of Michigan	University of Minnesota	Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University
2000	Bentley College	University of Michigan	University of Arkansas	University of Chicago	Williams College
2001	Cal St. Los Angeles	University of Michigan	University of Chicago	UT-Austin	Cornell
2002	Kansas St.	University of Michigan	UCLA	University of Florida	University of Chicago
2003	University of Pennsylvania	University of Chicago	University of Florida	University of Rochester	UCLA
2004	Auburn University at Montgomery	University of Minnesota	University of Michigan	University of Florida	Georgetown
2005	University of Washington	University of Minnesota	University of Rochester	Stanford	Truman St.
2006	University of Hartford	UCLA	University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign	Washington University in St. Louis	University of Minnesota
2007	USC	University of Minnesota	USC	Williams College	Baylor

References

Nasr, Carol (1969) The College Bowl Quiz Book. Doubleday, New York.

External links

★ College Bowl Company official web site

★ College Bowl history through 1977

★ IBM Case Study on automating College Bowl incorporated