College Bowl (which has carried a naming rights sponsor, initially General Electric and later Capital One) is a radio, television, and student quiz show.

[2] College Bowl originated as a USO activity created by Canadian Don Reid for soldiers serving in World War II.

During halftime, the players were allowed to show a short promotional film of their school or they might talk about career plans or the like.

The 1953–55 series had a powerful appeal because it used remote broadcasts; each team was located at their college where they were cheered on by their wildly enthusiastic classmates.

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.

Colgate later defeated Rutgers in a special one-time playoff contest to become the only six-time winner in a "five-win-limit" competition.

[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.: In 1989, College Bowl introduced its academic team championship for historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) called Honda Campus All-Star Challenge (HCASC) sponsored by American Honda Motor Company.

The program, presented by Bamber Gascoigne, produced by Granada Television and broadcast across the ITV network, was very popular and ran until it was taken off the air in 1987.

Season five, which was set to be telecast in 2011, failed to make it past pre-production after Zain sold its African network operations to Bharti Airtel.

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.

[11] [citation needed] 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.

On November 24, 2020, it was announced that a 10-episode revival of the series had been ordered at NBC, with Peyton Manning as host (and producer) and his brother Cooper serving as sidekick.

[14] The game is played using a modified version of the current Honda Campus All-Star Challenge rules, between two teams of three players, with no penalty for wrong answers.

During both rounds, the team that correctly answers the Face-Off question in a category earns the right to select the next one, regardless of the outcome of the Follow-Ups.

Each correct response scores 25 points, and a bonus is awarded after every fifth such answer, starting with 50 for the fifth and increasing by 25 for each additional set of five.

The round consists of eight questions, with the latter half including two "Extra Credit" categories that not only double the points but also feature two answers.

Listed by team name (seed), these were: Ole Miss (1), Tennessee (2), Michigan (3), USC (4), UCLA (5), Alabama (6), Columbia (7), and Auburn (8).

The semifinal results were as follows: For the final, the team with the higher cumulative score in all previous matches (USC) won the right to choose the first category in Round 1.

Columbia won the championship with a score of 790–775; team members Tamarah Wallace, Shomik Ghose, and Jake Fisher received $125,000 scholarships to put towards their college education, as did alternate Addis Boyd.

USC's Ann Nguyen, Karan Menon, and Brendan Glascock, along with alternate Astrid, received $25,000 scholarships as the runner-up team.

Listed by team name (seed), these were: Notre Dame (1), Oklahoma (2), Texas (3), Georgia (4), Washington (5), BYU (6), Penn State (7), Spelman (8), Syracuse (9), UC Santa Barbara (10), Columbia (11), and Duke (12).

The resulting order was: Penn State (1), Columbia (2), BYU (3), Georgia (4), Syracuse (5), and UC Santa Barbara (6).

The semifinal results were as follows: For the final, Georgia won the championship with a score of 910–855; team members Layla Parsa, Aidan Leahy, and Elijah Odunade received $125,000 scholarships to put towards their college education.

[15] The 1987 National Tournament on the Disney Channel saw additional controversy, as several protested matches proved to strain the television format.

These events and the growing Internet community of quiz bowl players led to a great increase in teams, tournaments, and formats.

However, as the final best-two-out-of-three series was held on Sunday, the team declined to participate, and the University of Virginia took their place instead.