20
March
This May will mark the 40th running of the Tournament of Champions at the University of Kentucky. Founded in 1972, the TOC has long been considered America’s foremost debate competition. Ever wonder which schools have had the most success at the TOC? Curious as to which state has advanced the most teams to elimination rounds? [...]
15
March
Sean Tiffee—a Ph.D. candidate in Rhetoric and Language Studies and an Assistant Debate Coach at the University of Texas—has written an interesting post on the UTNIF blog about the role of argumentation in debate. I made the decision to make my blog post about argumentation for two seemingly contradictory reasons. First, debate evolves at a [...]
14
March
The 65th National Debate Tournament will be held on March 25-28 at the University of Texas-Dallas. As part of the festivities, Debate Central and the Dallas Urban Debate Alliance have organized a Fundraising NDT that allows interested parties to support their favorite teams by
7
March
The final qualifying tournaments for the 2011 Tournament of Champions were held this past weekend. With the postseason now beginning, we can look back at the regular season and assess the performances of some of the country’s best teams. Who earned the most bids to the TOC? Who earned the best bids to the TOC? [...]
22
February
With the final two octafinals-bid tournaments of the year in the books, most of the teams at the top of the standings for this year’s National Debate Coaches Association David P. Baker Award for Season Long Excellence have completed their resumes. The top spot in the standings came down to a single ballot in the [...]
15
February
With their tournament championship and undefeated preliminary record at Stanford, St. Mark’s Rishee Batra and Alex Miles have put themselves in contention to win the Baker Award. Entering the final maximum-point qualifying tournaments of the season this weekend at Harvard and Berkeley, Westminster’s Ellis Allen and Daniel Taylor remain atop the standings and are the [...]
2
February
On the heels of Robert Kagan’s response to John Mearsheimer that Scott mentioned, Zalmay Khalilzad has joined in the fun with a reply of his own to “Imperial By Design”: Shifting to an offshore-balancer role now is premature. Adopting such a strategy would accelerate the rise of multipolarity and increase the risk of conflict among [...]
1
February
Along with the Baker Award standings, the rankings of the top individual speakers of the season has also been updated to include results from the Barkley Forum. As before, speakers are ranked in two ways: by their total share of speaker awards and by their average points per round. Remember, these rankings only include tournaments [...]
1
February
This past weekend included not only the Barkley Forum at Emory University—a maximum-point qualifying tournament—but also the final rounds of two previous tournaments, Blake and the University of Michigan. With these results added to the season-long statistics, the unofficial National Debate Coaches Association David P. Baker Award for Season Long Excellence standings have once again [...]
27
January
As promised, the latest edition of The 3NR Podcast centers entirely around reader/listener-submitted questions. With the full crew on board, the discussion covers a lot of ground including email evidence, the way that judges should (and do) balance explanation versus evidence, debating the case against COIN affirmatives, and more. Click on over to podcast.the3nr.com to [...]