D-U-M-B-A-S-S
Both Mike and Craig have interesting commentary on yesterday's National Spelling Bee and how it's lost a lot of relevancy despite its live coverage on ESPN (which even the French Open couldn't get).

Competitions like the spelling bee as well as many of the academic competitions that many of the people on the blogroll are part of have seen their difficulties rise exponentially in recent years. In a way, it seems like a rather organic process, but not necessarily a good one.

In either case, there's a rather fixed knowledge base, and back in the day, there was a certain baseline of difficulty developed that seemed fair at the time. Over time, though, the words or clues used would start feeling a bit overused. So to shake things up and make things seem more interesting (at least for organizers and hard-core players), the only way to go was dig deeper into that knowledge base and in effect ratcheting up the difficulty. There isn't enough "new" stuff added to the knowledge base over the years to keep the difficulty the same without repeating what's been asked before.

In the bee's case, you plumb further and further into bigger and bigger dictionaries to find more and more obscure words. In quizbowl's case (at least the types of competitions I'm used to seeing), you dig into deeper and more advanced texts to find more and more obscure clues and/or answers.

The unfortunate side effect is that some of these competitions get so hard that you can only watch these things in awe without even trying to find out how this stuff should be relevant. It becomes like a brainier version of Fear Factor. Honestly, what is the difference between watching some kid pass out, get up and spell a word that'll be used in .0005 percent of people's vocabularies and some guy or girl pass out while trying to eat 100 cockroaches in a minute?

In some ways, it mimics the evolution of today's athlete. As the accomplishments get more and more impressive, the types of athletes who can perform them become less diverse. NFL lineman have to be 300 pounds to succeed. Baseball pitchers don't have to be Randy Johnson's height, but they have to be in the 6-2, 6-3 range at least. The average 40 time, vertical leap, etc. of today's athlete is often superior to just 15-20 years ago. There are more advance training methods to get that way, just as there are more advanced and sophisticated ways and resources to train for a spelling bee.

Maybe it's only fitting that ESPN covered the Spelling Bee live and included it on SportsCenter. It's just another way to marvel at ridiculous feats that supposedly seem easy to the competitors but in no way can the average schmoe even fathom of doing.