Fancy Store-Bought Dirt

Team Quiz Prowess

This post exists as a placeholder for an obvious point (I'll save the keystrokes).

Some players are so dominant that the need for teammates to produce (or exist) approaches zero. That's relatively rare, though.

The best quiz teammate I can think of had/has very good command of a very significant chunk of questionspace. There were particular questions you could be fairly confident he'd answer, to the point where more than anyone (aside from the aforementioned individual juggernauts), you could accurately say that he pushes a team towards a championship.

I'm reluctant to elaborate because I know so well the particular person I have in mind. (The reluctance is both that I'd be personally biased towards him, and that I'd be more aware of his accomplishments than of some relative stranger's accomplishments.)

Note that both this post and the one below it focus entirely on "academic" quiz-bowl (or more precisely, everything that isn't explicitly dedicated solely to "trash"). On the trash circuit, the set of legends and dominant players and good teammates is rather different, though even there the person I have in mind has well-defined core competencies.