College Bowl

College Bowl (also known as General Electric (G.E.) College Bowl) is a radio, television, and student quiz show. College Bowl first aired on American radio stations in 1953. It then moved to American television broadcast networks, airing 1959 to 1963 on CBS and from 1963 to 1970 on NBC. In 1977, the game resurfaced as an activity on college campuses through an affiliation with the Association of College Unions International (ACUI) that lasted for 31 years. In 2008, the College Bowl Company announced its suspension of the College Bowl campus program, citing increased costs and financial infeasibility of continuing to work with ACUI. In November 2020, NBCUniversal announced a revival of the show with Peyton Manning as host and a ten-episode run has been ordered.[1]

For postseason college football games, see Bowl game.
G.E. College Bowl
still image from the 1966 season title sequence
Created byDon Reid
Presented byAllen Ludden (1959–1962)
Robert Earle (1962–1970)
Peyton Manning (2021)
Country of origin United States
No. of series12
Production
Running time30 Minutes
Release
Original networkCBS (1959–1963)
NBC (1963–1970, 2021)
Original releaseJanuary 4, 1959 (1959-01-04) –
present (present)

History

College Bowl originated as a USO activity created by Canadian Don Reid for soldiers serving in World War II. Reid and John Moses then developed the game into a radio show. Grant Tinker, later President of NBC and MTM Enterprises, got his start as an assistant on the show.

Richard Reid has led the College Bowl since 1975. He has created, produced and supervised all versions of College Bowl innovated since then (except for a 1984 NBC special).[2]

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 the like.

The first College Quiz Bowl match was played on NBC radio on October 10, 1953, when Northwestern University defeated Columbia University, 135–60. Twenty-six episodes ran in that first season, with winning teams receiving $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.

Television

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 1963, and moved back to NBC from 1963 to 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. Each winning team earned $1,500 in scholarship grants from General Electric with runner-up teams receiving $500. A team's fifth victory awarded $3,000 from General Electric plus $1,500 from Gimbels department stores for a grand total of $10,500.[3] On April 16, 1967, Seventeen magazine matched GE's payouts so that each victory won $3,000 and runners-up earned $1,000. The payouts from Gimbels department stores remained the same so that five-time champions retired with a grand total of $19,500.[4]

Colgate University was the first team to win five consecutive contests and become "retired undefeated champions," defeating New York University in Colgate's first appearance in April 1960 when NYU was going for its fifth win. Rutgers was the second college to win five contests and be retired. Colgate later defeated Rutgers in a special one-time playoff contest to become the only six-time winner in a "five-win-limit" competition. An upset occurred in 1961, when the small liberal arts colleges of Hobart and William Smith in Geneva, New York, defeated Baylor University to become the third college to retire undefeated. In another surprise, Lafayette College retired undefeated in fall 1962 after beating the University of California, Berkeley for its fifth victory, a David and Goliath event. Another upset occurred in 1966, when the all-female Agnes Scott College from Georgia defeated an all-male team from Princeton University.[5]

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 1960s and featured former college students
  • Bible Bowl, which has evolved into at least three separate national competitions and used the Bible as a source
  • High School Bowl, which was broadcast in some local TV markets and featured high school students

International versions

University Challenge
Main article: University Challenge

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 quizmaster. It remains very popular in Britain. The show, and the catch phrase used by Gascoigne (and later Paxman) before each toss-up question, "Your starter for 10," was the inspiration for the novel Starter for 10, and the subsequent film. A New Zealand version of University Challenge ran from 1976 to 1989, and was revived in 2014.

Challenging Times
Main article: Challenging Times

An Irish version of the competition called Challenging Times ran between 1991 and 2002. It was sponsored by The Irish Times newspaper, and presented by Kevin Myers, then a columnist with that newspaper. Over the course of the show, University College Cork had the most wins, with three, while National University of Ireland, Galway qualified for the most finals, winning twice and placing second twice.

Later history

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 1970, modern quiz bowl 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 Syra-quiz at Syracuse University, had occurred in the 1950s and 1960s.[6]

In 1976, the program became affiliated with the Association of College Unions International (ACUI) , which continued to promote the competition as a non-broadcast event after the demise of the radio and television experiments. That affiliation ended in 2008, and the College Bowl campus program is no longer active. The College Bowl Company continues to create, produce and license versions of College Bowl in the United States and elsewhere, including Africa Challenge (2007–10), which featured schools from Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia; University Challenge in New Zealand and India; University Challenge in the United Kingdom, which is seen every week in prime time on BBC 2; and the Honda Campus All-Star Challenge at historically black colleges and universities, sponsored by American Honda, which has awarded over $10,000,000 in institutional grants since its debut in 1989.[2]

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 concerns regarding the quality and difficulty of the questions used in College Bowl competitions.

On November 24, 2020, NBCUniversal announced a revival of the show with Peyton Manning as host and a ten-episode run has been ordered.[1]

  • In 2009, brief scenes from the early 1960s episodes of College Bowl with Allen Ludden appeared in the film Gifted Hands.
  • A brief scene of GE College Bowl with Allen Ludden appeared in the 1982 film Diner.

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.[7][8] 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.[7] The 1987 National Tournament on the Disney Channel saw additional controversy, as a number of protested matches proved to strain the television format. Especially in the early 1990s, The College Bowl Company 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 not to 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.[9]

Top four finishers of CBI National Championship Tournament (1978–2008)
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 State Washington University in St. Louis MIT Washington St.
1981 Marshall University University of Maryland Davidson Marshall Michigan State
1982 New York University 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 University of Southern California 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 State 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 California State University, Los Angeles University of Michigan University of Chicago University of Texas at Austin Cornell
2002 Kansas State University University of Michigan University of California, Los Angeles 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 University
2005 University of Washington University of Minnesota University of Rochester Stanford Truman State University
2006 University of Hartford UCLA University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign Washington University in St. Louis University of Minnesota
2007 University of Southern California University of Minnesota University of Southern California Williams College Baylor University
2008 Macalester College University of Rochester University of New Mexico University of Minnesota The Ohio State University
Source: "NCT Results: Season = 1977-1978 to 2007-2008"

No tournament was held in 1983 or 1985, though regional tournaments were held in each year.

†Tied for third (lost in semifinals, no playoff for third place).

††In 1994, Brigham Young University finished second in the round-robin, qualifying for the final series. However, as the final best-two-out-of-three series was held on Sunday, the team declined to participate, and the University of Virginia took their place instead. Brigham Young was awarded third place.

References
  • Nasr, Carol (1969) The College Bowl Quiz Book. Doubleday, New York.
  1. "Peyton Manning Set to Quarterback New NBC Battle of the Brain Series 'College Bowl'". NBCUniversal Media Village. Comcast, Inc. Retrieved 2020-11-24.
  2. "About Richard Reid", collegebowl.com. Retrieved 2021-02-04.
  3. "About the University". Wisconsin Alumni Magazine. 66 (8). May 1965.
  4. "Schenectady Gazette - Google News Archive Search".
  5. https://slate.com/culture/2018/08/agnes-scott-vs-princeton-college-bowl-the-biggest-upset-in-quiz-show-history.html
  6. Richard L., Phillips; Wright, Donald G. Hendricks Chapel: Seventy-five Years of Service to Syracuse University. p. 209.
  7. Siegel, Alan (May 3, 2012). "The Super Bowl of the Mind". Retrieved December 13, 2013.
  8. "1988/1982 "COLLEGE" BOWL CO. REGIONALS". BUZZER. 1 (3). Spring 1988. Retrieved December 17, 2014.
  9. Jennings, Ken (2006). Brainiac: Adventures in the Curious, Competitive, Compulsive World of Trivia Buffs. Villard. ISBN 978-1-4000-6445-8.
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