Interview by Logan Scisco
The Montgomery Bell Extemp Round Robin is a tournament that has occurred since 1999 and has featured the best extemporaneous speaking competitors the nation has ever seen. The list of participants over the years includes six CFL national champions, ten NFL national champions, and twelve NFL final round national champions. While the tournament is prestigious, it has often been shrouded by misconceptions about how it evolved and how its participants are selected.
Adam Johnson, a former extemporaneous speaking competitor for Montgomery Bell Academy and who has run the Round Robin for nearly a decade, was nice enough to sit down with Logan Scisco for this exclusive interview to clarify the misconceptions that has existed over the years about the Round Robin and to provide his insight into current trends in the extemporaneous speaking community.
Logan Scisco: First of all Adam, thank you for being willing to do this interview about the Montgomery Bell Academy Extemp Round Robin. For readers who may not know the history of MBA, could you give us a brief summary of what the purpose of the tournament is and how long it has been around.
Adam Johnson: MBA had been running an LD Round Robin since the early 1980s when we added the Extemp half of our round robin in 1999. The basic goal is to bring together the top 16 competitors in the country and place them into a format where the “best” person can emerge. During the first 5 rounds, each competitor meets every other competitor exactly once – the same process is then repeated in round 6-10. We have cross examination in every round and the top 5 (of the 16 competitors) advance to the exhibition round. Our ultimate goal is to create a tournament that is an “extemper’s Extemp tournament.” We send out invitations to competitors throughout the fall – starting in September and sending the last invites the first week of December. This year’s tournament runs January 9-11.
LS: Who came up with the format of the MBA Extemp Round Robin?
AJ: While that sounds like an easy question, it is somewhat difficult to pinpoint honestly. Having competed for MBA in the 1990s, I was always helping out at our Policy Debate / LD tournament. I would always sorta suggest to Billy Tate that we add Extemp, but we really just didn’t have enough room on campus to add anything else. I can really credit two people with inspiring the idea. In the summer of 1998, I attended an Extemp camp at the University of Texas and worked at a camp at Samford University. At UT, I floated the idea of an Extemp Round Robin with Randy Cox. At the time, he was a coach at Milton Academy. We talked about it a bit and he suggested that he had thought about running one at Milton. Later that summer, I was working with Dan Mangis at Samford and we started talking about how the tournament could work. I guess I credit myself with designing the actual format. Since we always had 12 people at the LD round robin, the original vision was to have 12 people with 2 sections of 6 each round. At the time, I talked with then Executive Secretary of the NFL Jim Copeland a great deal. We talked about 5 sections of 3. We finally settled on 3 sections of 5 with CX each round before we sent out invites in December of 1998 for the first Round Robin. With such a late delivery of invites, we actually barely even got the thing off the ground at first.
LS: What is the biggest misconception people have about the Round Robin?
AJ: I’m not really sure. I feel certain there are hundreds that I’ll learn about in the future!! Probably the biggest area would be rules about entry. To clear the air, there are no rules about entry. People have always thought we had a 1 student per school rule – that’s sorta true. We need compelling evidence to invite 2 people from a given school, but we’ve done it several times. In fact in year 1, we had 2 people from the same school. Within the past 5 years, I’ve even considered three people from 1 school once, but just didn’t quite do it. We really just look for the 16 best people and constrain ourselves to the smallest extent possible.
LS: When you are making selections for participants, what criteria do you use?
AJ: Great Question!! I love answering that because so many people suspect that it is so weird. What I always tell people is that the first 10 picks just jump of the page. If you locked a random person in a room and handed them a stack of Extemp results, they would produce the first 10 in about an hour. After that, it gets harder. Every year, I take about a 5 month break after the round robin. I will save the results from Harvard, Berkley, state tournaments, the Extemp TOC, and NCFLs but I don’t pay much attention to them. After NFL Nationals, I compile it all into a spreadsheet so I can look at how people do throughout the year. I continue adding tournaments throughout the Fall. When someone accomplishes enough that I determine that I would invite them “no matter what they did after that,” I email their coach an invite. I specifically look for consistent success and elite success. I want competitors who have distinguished themselves by defeating other top notch competitors. That can happen at the national or local level. I have invited people in the past that have surprised people – then the person goes on to win Nationals. But, I saw them beating a national circuit competitor at every local tournament they attended. I do rely on a small committee of regionally dispersed individuals that give me results and suggest people. I also welcome people just emailing me with their results. I have certainly taken many of those sorts of people. It is impossible for me to have results from every tournament that takes place, but we get all the big ones and word of mouth recommendations and personal nominations fill out the field.
LS: Several years ago, the MBA field was expanded from 15 entries to 16. Why the change?
AJ: Well, we’ve really been tweaking things since the first year to accomplish 2 goals: 1. Balancing the number of times people meet 2. Gathering enough ballots to create separation in the field. The first two years of the tournament we had 7 rounds. Each round had 3 sections of 5 with 2 judges in each section. That format worked ok, but we decided we really needed more rounds and had plenty of time for more rounds. So in year 3, we expanded to 9 rounds. That started to spread things out a bit, but we had two years in a row in which the top 3 at the tournament were separated by 1 rank. To spread things out a bit we added an additional judge in year 6. Having resolved the closeness of the results, we turned to the way we paired the tournament. It turns out that 3 sections of 5 is a format that is extremely difficult to pair. Some people met twice, some three times, and some four times. That was fine, but it was inherently unequal – it wasn’t a true round robin. Every year, the pairings got “better,” there was still imbalance. After working with a few people, we discovered that adding a round and adding a competitor would resolve the problem if we moved to 4 sections of 4. Now, the pairings are simple to make – each competitor meets exactly once in the first 5 rounds then exactly 1 more time in the second 5 rounds. I’m very pleased with the format of the tournament and have not changed it in about 4 years now – I don’t anticipate any additional changes.
LS: When assigning judges, do you like for there to be a balance between delivery and analytical judges or a bias towards analytical ones?
AJ: No. I think I end up with more analytical judges, but that’s just symptomatic of where I get my judges from. I have the coaches of the round robin who tend to be hard core Extemp fans. Those people tend to like deep analysis. I have judges from the LD round robin who often coach Extemp as well and tend to be very analysis focused. Then I have a combination of college coaches / competitors and MBA Extemp alums – both of those groups are biased towards analysis. When I’m assigning judges, I don’t pay any attention at all to whom I am assigning. Each competitor is going to have 30 ballots determine their ultimate placing in the field. No judge will see a given person more than 3 times and most judges will see everyone twice. Within that framework, it is my opinion that it doesn’t matter when you get a particular judge. So some panels might have more of a tilt one way or the other, but the randomness of it all tends to mitigate bias – though I do acknowledge that there is an inherent pro-analytical bias to some extent.
LS: Over the years, what is the strangest change you’ve made over the years to the Round Robin?
AJ: Well, we actually stopped including the results sheet in the final ballot packet about 5 years ago. Instead we email the results that night. At the awards assembly, we announce the top 6, but wait until later for people to see the rest. We did this for a very specific reason – it is hard to see a cum of 100 when you are used to winning tournaments. Because we have 10 rounds and 3 judges per section, someone gets to a cum of 100 every single year. I have seen so many top notch competitors just break down after seeing that results sheet. It made for an unpleasant ending to the tournament to have some guy crying behind the library. So we email things out now and that has made for a more enjoyable time when people are departing.
LS: The MBA Round Robin has had many great champions over the years. Which one do you think was the best?
AJ: I’ll go with Josh Bone. He won the exhibition round in 2003 and 2004. He lost the 2003 round robin to his in state buddy David Tannenwald by 1 rank – Bone took a 2 in the last round and Tannenwald took three 1s to win. Then, Bone just blew out the field in 2004 by 28. The combination of those two years is far better than anyone else has put on the board. Just watching the ballots come in during the 2004 round robin was unreal. By Saturday morning (round 4 of 10), it was clear that the tournament was going to be a race for second since the championship had really slipped away from the field. It was pretty impressive.
LS: The round robin is known for its impressive fields over the last ten years. Which year do you think had the most competitive round robin field?
AJ: That’s a seriously tough question. I can answer the opposite much more easily – the first year had the worst field!!! I know that for sure. We started so late and had so little time that it was hard to assemble a really top notch field. In general, I think the fields have been getting better every year as I’ve been able to extend my reach in terms of getting people from across the entire country. If I had to pick a year, I would say 2007. Our final round was Tex Dawson, Alex Stephenson, Aaron Mattis, Spencer Rockwell, and Akshay Rao. Show me a tournament that has ever had a final round that good! Charlie Alderman, Markus Brazzill, Mark Isaacson, David Kumbroch, Addie Lerner, Charlie Metzger, Brian Stephan, Billy Strong, Max Webster are notable names in that field that didn’t even make the exhibition round. In terms of having great people at the top, our 2003 final with Tannewald, Bone, Singer, and Hemel was incredibly good though as well. 2007 beats 2003 top to bottom though. A final comment though – our first year actually probably landed the very top talent out there. That year, Lucas Kline, Ted Murphy, and Jay Cox had just dominated the circuit (and had done so for a couple years) and we managed to talk them all into coming. I think getting them that year was key to getting the type of draw we’ve enjoyed in the past several years since then.
LS: Are there any dominating performances in the history of the tournament that stand out to you?
AJ: The top 2 were in back to back years – 2004 and 2005. For whatever reason, the field has been more competitive at the top since then. In 2004, Josh Bone had a average rank of 1.15 over 27 ballots. That’s just incredible. He had a cum of 31 – second place had 59! The next year, Kevin Troy had an average rank of 1.23 over 30 ballots. Both of those years really stick out because the competitors just blasted the competition, but Bone’s dominance was even better.
LS: MBA was one of the leaders in having an open cross-examination session in extemp as opposed to the old NFL model of a one minute question a and a two minute answer. What benefits do you believe the open cross-examination model has in extemp?
AJ: I really led the charge on that change nationally – when I competed, we had the 1 minute question/2 minute answer format and I thought it was so silly for a couple reasons (My 2001 Rostrum article details all of my reasons). For the questioner, how on earth are you supposed to ask a 1 minute long question. There was a lot of rambling that went on with the questioning. You basically had to give a 40 second Extemp speech then ask a 20 second question. For the answerer, the format was even more absurd. You had 2 minutes to ramble on about someone’s 1 minute question. So I proposed simply using the open CX format that every form of debate used. I do think that format has served Extemp well. First, I think it provides a better check on extempers being loose with the facts. 3 minutes of intense careful questioning and redirecting can really show when someone is being truthful. Second, open cross-examination is the only way to really let the hardest workers be rewarded. They can demonstrate deep knowledge on a question that is not even their own. I think that can be very impressive when someone speaks on say Latin America and then leads a great discussion of an unrelated problem in Africa. Finally, open cross-examination permits us to witness an actual dialogue. It is so easy for someone to unintentionally misconstrue a cross-ex question or even intentionally reframe the cross-ex question to make the exercise easy or make the questioner look stupid. In an open format, that is not possible. The questioner can redirect / cutoff the answerer and place the emphasis back on the originally intended subject. I think those are the three best things though I think there are many more – notably, that this format is so much less boring!!
LS: Do you believe that NFL should go back to a three minute CX period or keep its two minute CX period?
AJ: Don’t even get me started on that one! I feel like this is the classic case of having a solution chasing a problem. Having watched all (and judged most) of the NFL Final rounds with open cx, I (admittedly biased) have really enjoyed the new format. If anything, I thought that elite extempers could probably be assisted by EXTENDING the cx time to 3:30 or 4:00. I never would have advocated cutting the time down. Those minutes really flew by – if you could get out a question and answer every 45 seconds, I was really impressed. That meant you could ask 4 questions – maybe 5 if you were lucky. Now we’re talking about as few as 2 questions being asked. That really decreases the impact of the exercise and I think that’s unfortunate.
LS: Final question, what do you believe it takes to win the Round Robin?
AJ: Being really really good!!! More specifically it requires a combination of 4 things – confidence, consistency, great dynamic analysis (having something different to say than other people), and excellent delivery. Delivery alone has earned plenty of 16th place finishes and analysis alone has done nearly the same thing. But, when I look back at the people who won I see a lot of creativity – people that really worked hard to have truly unique and interesting things to say about every question. When given a vanilla question about something like an election – they didn’t just say that candidate x was going to win because he had more money, people liked them, and they had an early lead. They had something creative to add to the discussion that made people think they were clever – in every case, that dynamic analysis was packaged with high level sources – lots of them and lots of serious journal citations as well. But even more than that, you have to be confident. Having competed in the round robin, I will certify that it is terrifying to walk into that field. You look around and everyone has won something big – or if they haven’t won, they’ve been in the top 3 several times at big tournaments. That is really intimidating even if you’ve won a lot of tournaments. Being consistent in that sort of environment is extremely challenging. You really have to believe in yourself and believe that you can beat anyone in the country. I have seen so many national finalists crumble under the pressure of 10 rounds against elite competition. It really is a unique and tough game to play. When people relax though, they seem to have a great time.