Penn Bowl

Penn Bowl is a quizbowl tournament held every year at Penn.

For the entire 1990s, it was indisputably the most prestigious invitational title, and even until 2002 or so it drew a 64-team field, equal in size to the NAQT ICT and bigger than any other event. It nonetheless featured a reliably annual flare-up of either terrible questions, trainwreck logistics, scandalous protest resolution, or some combination of those things. From 2003 to 2006 the tournament grew smaller and smaller, and instead of being an interesting chance to play a variety of nationwide teams on bad questions, it was just a regular local tournament with bad questions. This trend in question quality reversed from 2007 onward, and Penn Bowl now draws several teams from further north and south.

History

Penn Bowl used to be a two day tournament. In the years of 64 or 68 teams, about six rounds were played on Friday night and the balance on Saturday. The field was split into four groups and played a round-robin. (This took at least 17 rounds because teams couldn't play their own packet.) The top four teams in each bracket advanced to a single-elimination playoff.

The tournament was famous for its delays. (Indeed, one joke called it "Penn-ding" Bowl.) Teams would show up late on Friday night, and again on Saturday morning. In 2001, the tournament stopped for an hour while a new packet was assembled due to the wrong set of questions being read. Also, the need for thirty moderators often placed inexperienced players into the role.

The tournament was on the clock until 2002. Subsequently, the tournament went untimed but maintained NAQT-ish questions in style and length for a few years. The tournament is now mACF in style and gameplay, and played over one day.

The 2005 Penn Bowl was held in spite of an impending snow storm. As the day progressed, the storm got worse and stranded many teams including Maryland in Philadelphia for the night.

From 2007 to 2009, Matt Weiner was the chief editor for Penn Bowl. This move was widely praised for bringing a marked increase in quality of the questions in the tournament.

Since arriving at Penn in 2010, Eric Mukherjee has overseen the tournament, with the exception of the 2011 iteration, in which several non-Eric Penn people oversaw a Penn Bowl of significantly greater length and difficulty (and ironically subtitled the tournament "Written Entirely by Eric Mukherjee"). Logistics generally improved, with the exception of the 2012 iteration (see below), with the event generally being well-received, if not slightly above its difficulty targets.

Results

Penn Bowl	Date	Champion	Second	Editor	Field size	Notes	Stats
Penn Bowl I	February 2-3, 1991	Princeton	Penn State		31	Some info
Penn Bowl II	January 1992	Chicago	MIT
Penn Bowl III	January 1993	Vanderbilt	Chicago
Penn Bowl IV	January 28-29, 1994	Georgia Tech	Chicago	Pat Matthews	44	More teams were expected, but a snowstorm reduced the field.
Penn Bowl V	January 27-28, 1995	Chicago	Maryland	Pat Matthews	64
Penn Bowl VI	January 27-28, 1996	Michigan	Maryland	Pat Matthews	64	Often called the best of all the old-style tournaments (College Bowl-style questions and rules, very large field) by old people. Some info
Penn Bowl VII	January 24-25, 1998	Chicago	Vanderbilt	Jason Arvey	64	Penn Bowl was not held in 1997 so that Penn could host the first NAQT ICT in its traditional place.
Penn Bowl VIII	January 29-30, 1999	Chicago	South Carolina	Mario Lucero	64	Some info
Penn Bowl IX	January 22-23, 2000	Yale	Cornell	Penn team		Featured three of the top four seeds losing in the first playoff round on a packet with a lot of food-related trash tossups.
Penn Bowl X	January 26-27, 2001	Michigan	Princeton	Samer Ismail
Penn Bowl XI	January 25-26, 2002	Princeton	Virginia	Samer Ismail
Penn Bowl XII	January 24-25, 2003	Michigan	Berkeley	Samer Ismail	58
Penn Bowl XIII	January 23-24, 2004	Yale	Michigan	Samer Ismail		Featured David Isaacson whining his way into a victory via the "nobody held a gun to their heads" incident
Penn Bowl XIV	January 22, 2005	Florida	Rochester	Nobody		Snow!
Penn Bowl XV	January 2006	North Carolina	Maryland	Charlie Steinhice		Packets were a Sword Bowl mirror. This was a bad idea.
Penn Bowl XVI	January 20, 2007	Brown	Chicago	Matt Weiner, Eric Kwartler, and Noah Rahman	21	Early expiration of room reservations led to the last few rounds not being played, meaning the first round robin could not be completed, and many teams did not get a chance to play each other	Partial stats
Penn Bowl XVII	January 26, 2008	Maryland	Vanderbilt	Matt Weiner and Billy Beyer	22		Stats
Penn Bowl XVIII	January 24, 2009	Chicago A	Brown	Matt Weiner, Mehdi Razvi, and Mike Bentley	24		Stats (Midwest mirror stats, Northwest mirror stats, Southeast mirror stats)
Penn Bowl XIX	January 25, 2010	Harvard A	Brown A	Mehdi Razvi, Sid Chandrasekar, Chris White, and Eric Mukherjee	25		Prelim stats
Penn Bowl XX	February 12, 2011	UVA	Maryland	Mehdi Razvi, Dominic Machado, Ming Lin, and James Lasker	18		Stats
Penn Bowl XXI	January 28, 2012	UVA	Yale	Eric Mukherjee, James Lasker, Saajid Moyen, Patrick Liao	18	The latter rounds were written during the tournament itself. Citing exhaustion, writing stopped with packet 13 (Editor's 10), which would not have been sufficient to complete an advantaged final if Yale had won game one (thankfully, they didn't). Succeeded by the final, and exponentially more disastrous, incarnation of Penn Bowl Trash.	Stats
not held	February 2, 2013					Mirror of VCU Closed held in its place
Penn Bowl XXII	October 19, 2013	UVA	Columbia A	Eric Mukherjee, Saajid Moyen, Patrick Liao	24		Stats
Penn Bowl XXIII (not officially numbered)	October 18, 2014	UVA	Maryland A	Eric Mukherjee, Rob Carson, Patrick Liao, Will Alston	27	No major issues; finished 13 rounds for all teams by 6 PM and the finals by 7	Stats
Penn Bowl XXIV (not officially numbered)	October 24, 2015	Maryland A	Columbia A	Eric Mukherjee, Rob Carson, Patrick Liao, Ike Jose, Eddie Kim	38	No major issues; finished 12 rounds for all teams by 6 PM and the finals by 7	Stats
Penn Bowl XXV	October 22, 2016	Maryland A	Princeton	Eric Mukherjee, Ike Jose, Will Alston, Patrick Liao, Ankit Aggarwal, Chris Chiego	28	No major issues; finished 12 rounds for all teams by 6 PM and the finals by 7	Stats
Penn Bowl XXVI	October 21, 2017	Columbia A	Virginia A	Jaimie Carlson, Jason Zhou, Jordan Brownstein, and Eric Mukherjee	30	No major issues; finished 13 rounds for all teams by 6 PM and the finals by 7	Stats