Higher Purpose, Addicted To Knowledge, and Greatest Of All Time buzzed in answers during a “Jeopardy”-style competition focused on the history, pop culture and other facts with black trivia. The Knowledge Bowl is one of many Black History Month events on campus.
HP and ATK dominated the competition, while junior team captain Aboiye Oshodi of GOAT said he was happy his team was not disqualified.
Oshodi was sitting at his team’s table in the Neal-Marshall Grand Hall when he received a text from his roommates stating they weren’t going to be able to make it, but a couple of his friends in the audience were able to step up and compete with him.
ATK took the lead of $4,700 after two rounds, competing head-to-head with HP in Final Jeopardy. Isaiah Sloss, captain of HP, said he and his three team members were not expecting such strong competition from ATK.
Cassia LeBron-Willia, captain of ATK, said their rival “came to win” last night. She said her team will definitely be back next year.
Sloss said he and his team knew after the first round ATK was going to be a threat to ?defending their title.
“It got down to the very last question,” Sloss said. “And I really saw how screwed, in terms of points, that we were.”
Sloss said his team went into Final Jeopardy expecting a difficult question, but the competition had never been so close in previous years.
The final question asked the teams to identify another term for the number 150, as the Emancipation Proclamation will be celebrating its 150th anniversary this year.
He said his team leaned back on “the strategy of the game” in order to pull out a win against ATK.
“At this point they had shown that they are a team of intelligent people,” he said. “So I knew that if we didn’t know the answer, chances are they didn’t know it either.”
He said their only chance of winning the competition was to hope ATK would wager more points and not know the answer to the question.
The term the judges were looking for was “sesquicentennial.” ATK wagered all of their money with the answer “centennial, and a half” and HP wagered $0 with the answer “What is Jesus?” in Final Jeopardy.
“He’s always the answer,” Sloss said. “We couldn’t go wrong with that one.”
HP won $300 and kept their title as champions of Black Knowledge Bowl 2015. Amrita Myers, associate professor of the Department of History and contributing judge, said she hoped ATK would beat them this year.
Though frigid weather meant a smaller crowd than expected, Neal-Marshall Director Stephanie Powers-Carter said she was happy with the turnout.
“Freshmen team, you guys really gave HP a run for their money this year,” ?Powers-Carter said.
