North County Academic League

North County Academic League is a format of high school quizbowl played in northern San Diego County, California and run by a group of coaches and former coaches indirectly with the North County Principals' Conference. The season runs from January to March, when the four regional champions meet for the championship tournament. Various matches are televised on San Diego County Office of Education Instructional Television (ITV Channel 16). The winner of the Academic League was sent to the NAC at some point, but that tradition has not continued recently.

Format

Academic League matches are played in tossup-bonus format and are timed (time varies depending on whether it is a Novice, Junior Varsity, or Varsity match). Tossups are worth three points and bonuses worth five points. A neg rule is also in play; teams are deducted one point for an incorrect answer at any point during or after the tossup, but not if the opponent has already been penalized for an incorrect answer. Bonuses are either three, four, or five parts, and 20 seconds is given for conferral on all parts, after which points are awarded based on how many parts the team got correct. The team with more points when time expires wins. If time expires in the middle of a tossup-bonus cycle, the tossup and/or bonus will be completed.

The top two teams in each division each year advance to an 8 team, single-elimination playoff. The winner of that playoff represents NCAL at the County Academic League championship on ITV.

Questions

According to the 2006 rules, each coach is required to submit 6 tossup and 6 bonus questions each year. "Coaches may write questions themselves, solicit an expert, or purchase the questions." Nine current events questions per week, all tossups, are to be written by the moderators directly out of the Time magazine dated Monday of that week. Questions are added to and taken out of a question bank, which means that verbatim repeats do occur from time to time, as attested to by several players.

Controversy

In a 2007 match between La Jolla and Scripps Ranch for one of the regional championships, a closely fought match went to overtime. The tiebreak tossup asked which nation was the first to be established with the help of the United Nations. Scripps Ranch answered with Israel, was ruled incorrect, and lost one point (thereby losing the match). The answer on the page turned out to be Libya. As the county championships were not for several weeks, and the game took place on a weekday night and would not be broadcast until that Sunday, Scripps Ranch was able to file an official protest the next day. The team cited both the CIA World Factbook and U.N. Resolutions as evidence that Israel was established with the help of the United Nations three years before Libya was. The protest was denied and the regional commissioner cited two sources in their denial, printouts of which were mailed to the Scripps Ranch coach. The commissioner claimed the first source was Encyclopedia Britannica. The second source was Debbie's Super Trivia Encyclopedia. Emily from Scripps Ranch decided to e-mail Ken Jennings about this travesty. Ken's response, which can be found in this blog entry, notes that this kind of stuff happened all the time when he played CBI, which he describes as a "similarly monolithic and complacent organization". Results of an online search appear to indicate that the correct answer to the question depends entirely upon the exact wording of the question.

In addition to continuing complaints over the non-pyramidal questions and repeats, the league division alignment has also been curiously changed to put almost all of the pyramidal quizbowl teams in the same division, thus limiting the number of them that can make the playoffs each year. As of 2015-2016, Coast Division powerhouses Torrey Pines and Canyon Crest were moved to the Inland Division, where they must play Rancho Bernardo, Westview, and Del Norte (which in the 2015-2016 year encompassed 4 of the top 50 teams in the country, according to the Morlan Rank).

External Links

• Official webpage
• Rules as of 2006
• Code of Conduct for the 2006 and 2007 seasons
• Link to first part of an episode
• Website featuring the TV Airing of Academic League Matches