Hi! I am a current second-year at the University of Chicago majoring in Computational and Applied Mathematics. I have had a passion for numbers all throughout childhood, and data and statistics have always fascinated me, so I decided to start this blog. I post results from my own fun data science projects, covering a wide variety of areas, on this website every Friday!
I am a huge trivia nerd and an avid quiz bowl player. My own team, the University of Chicago’s, bills itself as “The winningest quiz bowl team of all time.” But is this really true? To figure this out, I turned to the college quiz bowl dataset , a convenient open-use Numbers spreadsheet made by Ryan Rosenberg that contains the results of most quiz bowl matches played between the 2011-12 season and the 2021-22 season. I then loaded that data into R and got to work.
For those who do not know, quiz bowl is a buzzer-based game played between two teams of four. While similar competitions have been going on since at least the 1950s, quizbowl in its current form gained widespread popularity around the late 1990s and has continued to grow ever since. The teams compete to answer both individual and teamwork questions, predominantly in the subject areas of literature, science, history, fine arts, philosophy, and social science but with the occasional pop culture question (lovingly referred to as “trash”) sprinkled in. Each match takes between 30 and 40 minutes, after which the team with the most points is declared the winner. Quizbowl tournaments, which usually last the entire day, involve each team playing about 9-12 matches. Importantly, schools can send more than one team to a tournament. UChicago, for example, usually sends not only an A team but also a B team, a C team, and so on.
To determine the winningest quizbowl team of all time (or at least of the past decade), I created two new variables, one for the winning school and one for the losing school in each match in the data set. There were 73,377 matches in the data set spanning the aforementioned 11 seasons, 73,370 of which ended in a result (7 games were ties for some reason, including one involving UChicago. I ignored those games). Then, I made two tables, one counting the number of times each school appeared as a “winning school” and the other counting the number of times they appeared as a “losing school.” After joining the tables into one, I was left with the (mostly complete) overall record of all 834 quiz bowl-playing “colleges” (a lot of these teams were actually ambitious high school teams or one-off “chimeras” composed of students from multiple schools) from the 2011-12 season to the 2021-22 season. My results were as follows :
We are, in fact, the winningest quiz bowl team of “all time,” with 50% more wins than second place! Unfortunately, we are also the losingest quizbowl team of “all time”, with 1,793 losses over that span (the gap between us and second place, however, is only 177). Interestingly, despite all of their hype and prestige, no Ivy League schools appear in the top five (Columbia is the highest of the eight). And while the SEC can claim superiority in football, the Big Ten is clearly the nation’s top conference for quizbowl, with three teams in the top five (plus former founding member Chicago). Unfortunately, Chicago does not register on the list of the teams with the highest winning-percentage (min. 500 games played):
Interestingly, none of the five teams with the most wins were in the top five of winning percentage.
Next, I wanted to see who did we beat up on (or lose to) the most? By filtering the data so that only games where Chicago was the winning school (or losing school) appeared and then counting each school’s appearances as the losing school (or winning school), I obtained the following results:
More than a quarter of our 1,793 losses were to ourselves.
My final task was to determine at what site have we played the most matches over the past 11 years? I filtered the table to only include games involving Chicago, and this is what I found:
Once again, geography rules. It is definitely a sign of our success that we have played almost as many games at the O’Hare Hyatt (site of one of the two national tournaments in most years) as at Northwestern. Some more exotic destinations include UC Berkeley (22 games), VCU (13 games), and Rice (11 games).
In conclusion, the University of Chicago is by far the winningest team of the past decade (and probably of all time), with almost 1,000 more wins than second-place UC Berkeley, although we do not do quite as well in winning percentage. More than half of our games have been played in-state, usually at home or at Illinois, and it is nearby teams who we have beaten up on (and lost to) the most. Alabama (38th in quizbowl wins) can say all they want about football, and UCLA (58th) can say all they want about basketball, but when it comes to quizbowl, you can’t beat the University of Chicago.