I've been involved in quizbowl for over 20 years (eek!) and have experience in all 3 of the formats we've been debating of late. I can make a compelling case that each of the three serves a unique and valid purpose and that there's room for all 3, and I take my UTC team to all of the above. I have a soft spot for ACF, partly because I was around when it started and close to its founders, partly because I was on the first ACF championship team, but mainly because I prefer the untimed format and pyramidal structure that ACF offered as a contrast to CBCI. While I agree that official ACF questions have gotten harder than they should, I thought this year's ACF Regionals was a fine step in the right direction. Questions were challenging and rewarded superior depth of knowledge, but were about things most well-educated folks should at least have heard of. I thought it noteworthy that at Midsouth Regionals, not a single tossup went unanswered in all rooms. So why did we have only 16 teams at ACF Nationals this year -- including 3 house teams? It certainly isn't the format. Since the fall of 1998 UTC has hosted 8 independent ACF-style tournaments. 47 different schools have attended, and the average field has been 20 teams from 15 schools. Our "junior bird" Sword Bowl, held the same weekend as Penn Bowl, drew 15 teams in both 2000 and 2001. Every other tournament we've hosted had a larger field than this year's ACF Nationals. Could it be the question difficulty? I thought this year's nationals questions were just too hard -- many questions couldn't be answered by senior honors students in the given subject area. But of course no one knew that in advance. Were last year's questions that hard? Part of the problem, certainly, is perception. ACF scares people away, sometimes by their questions, sometimes by their own words. Teams dubbed "weekend warriors" are often composed of bright, hard-working students who have jobs and other obligations. They can't all devote extra hours to studying just for ACF's level of depth. But they will attend -- and often do well at -- slightly less difficult ACF-style tournaments. Part of it is marketing. NAQT has done a fine job of getting their product and message out to the quizbowl community. CBCI markets to a different audience -- university administrators. But if ACF does anything to reach out to newer or smaller programs, I don't see it. Perhaps it's because no one is really sure who ACF is, who makes the decisions -- and whose responsibility it is to get the word out. But this year I think there was another overlooked obstacle to ACF's success: tournament timing. ACF Regionals 2001 were just too early in the spring semester to get a lot of teams there. Several of the teams that usually attend UTC tournaments told me they couldn't get organized after the holidays quickly enough. The 11-team field we had for ACF Midsouth Regionals was the smallest field we've had for any tournament -- a shame, since we had perhaps our strongest reader corps ever on hand and could have easily run a 30-team tournament. And that also means few teams heard those more accesible regionals questions that might have softened some opinions on ACF. Similarly, March seems early for a national championship, and this year's ACF Nationals may have conflicted with some spring breaks. Anyway, that's more than enough for now. I remain a fan of ACF and hope they can right the ship and once again draw *all* the best teams for their Nationals.
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