College Bowl
College Bowl (which has carried a naming rights sponsor, initially General Electric and later Capital One) is a radio, television, and student quiz show. College Bowl first aired on the NBC Radio Network in 1953 as College Quiz Bowl. It then moved to American television broadcast networks, airing from 1959 to 1963 on CBS and from 1963 to 1970 on NBC. In 1977, the president of College Bowl, Richard Reid, developed it into a non-televised national championship competition on campuses across America through an affiliation with the Association of College Unions International (ACUI), which lasted for 31 years. In 1989, College Bowl introduced a (sponsored) version of College Bowl for historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) called Honda Campus All-Star Challenge (HCASC) which is ongoing. In 2007, College Bowl produced a new version and format of the game as an international championship in Africa, called Africa Challenge (Celtel Africa Challenge, Zain Africa Challenge). The College Bowl Campus Program and National Championship ran until 2008.
For postseason college football games, see Bowl game.College Bowl
Don Reid
Richard Reid
Carrie Havel (2021–22)
David Russo (2021–22)
United States
English
- 3 (1979–82)
- 1 (1987)
- 2 (2021–22)
20 (2021–22)
- Richard Reid
- Peyton Manning (2021–22)
- Cooper Manning (2021–22)
- Eli Manning (2021–22)
- Mark Itkin (2021–22)
- Harry Friedman (2022)
Trilith Studios (2022)
- 30 minutes (1953–87)
- 60 minutes (2021–22)
- Richard Reid Productions
- Tough Lamb Media (2021–22)
- Village Roadshow Television (2021–22)
- Universal Television Alternative Studio (2021–22)
- Omaha Productions (2022)
- NBC (1953–55, 1963–70, 2021–22)
- CBS (1959–63, 1979–82)
- Disney Channel (1987)
October 10, 1953 –
October 28, 2022
In November 2020, NBC announced a revival of the show, developed from the format of Honda Campus All-Star Challenge and Africa Challenge, with Peyton Manning as host and a ten-episode run ordered.[1] The revival, Capital One College Bowl, aired from June 22, 2021 to October 28, 2022.[2]
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 the 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.[4] 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 Gimbel's department stores remained the same so that five-time champions retired with a grand total of $19,500.[5]
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. Pomona College began its five-game G.E. College Bowl winning streak on October 15, 1961, by first defeating Texas Christian University followed by the University of Washington, Hood College, Amherst College, and Washington and Lee University.[6][7] 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. Ohio Wesleyan University retired undefeated easily beating Bard, Marymount, UCLA, Michigan Tech, and Alfred. Another upset occurred in 1966 when the all-female Agnes Scott College from Georgia defeated an all-male team from Princeton University.[8]
The show licensed and spun off three other academic competitions in the U.S.:
Later history[edit]
The game returned to radio from 1979 to 1982, hosted by Art Fleming, with the 1978 and 1979 national tournament semi-finals and finals appearing on syndicated television. The two champions from those years earned $5,000 for their school and competed against teams from the UK for a $7,500 grant in the "College Bowl World Championship," which was also televised. In 1978, Stanford defeated Yale with a score of 260–200 at the US Championships, earning the right to represent the US against a UK all-star team. The UK all-star team, composed of two students from Oxford, one student from Nottingham, and one from Durham, defeated the US team with a score of 385–55. The game played in 1978 between the US and the UK followed College Bowl rules. In 1979, Davidson College emerged as the winner of the US Championships and competed against Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge University under University Challenge rules. Once again, the UK team secured a win. There have been two television appearances since then; the 1984 tournament semi-finals and finals aired on NBC, hosted by Pat Sajak, 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.[11]
In 1976, the program became affiliated with the Association of College Unions International (ACUI),[12] 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 primetime 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.[3]
In the 1990s with the rise of the Academic Competition Federation and National Academic Quiz Tournaments, both with their national championships, several 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 that 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 course load), 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.
Criticism[edit]
In the 1987 regional tournament, College Bowl was accused of recycling questions from previous tournaments, thereby possibly compromising the integrity of results.[15][16] 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.[15] The 1987 National Tournament on the Disney Channel saw additional controversy, as several 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. These events and the growing Internet community of quiz bowl players led to a great increase in teams, tournaments, and formats.[17]