BOWL ELIGIBLE

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The Hardest College Football Trivia Questions We Could Build

Twenty-five questions from the deepest tier of the Bowl Eligible trivia bank, the tier Sudden Death saves for last: forgotten stadiums, exact capacities, 1970s Heisman winners, and tenth-round draft picks.

Our Sudden Death game is a survival run. The questions start friendly and get meaner the longer you live, because the bank behind it is sorted into three tiers by the difficulty score built into every question: 2,741 questions in the shallow end, 14,823 in the middle, and 19,638 in the deep end. One honest note before we start: we do not have player success-rate data yet, so "hardest" here means hardest by construction, the questions the bank itself grades as its most obscure material. Having read them, we think the bank grades generously. Here are 25 of the deep end's finest. Answers included, because otherwise this page would just be cruelty.

Stadiums nobody can name

  1. Bill Buxton Stadium is the home stadium of which school? Simpson College
  2. Glo Fiber Field at Shentel Stadium is the home stadium of which school? Shenandoah University
  3. John P. Papp Stadium is the home stadium of which school? College of Wooster
  4. Pratt Field is the home stadium of which school? Amherst
  5. Mountaineer Bowl is the home stadium of which school? Western Colorado University

Which division, exactly?

  1. Upper Iowa University competes in which NCAA division in football? D2
  2. Whitworth competes in which NCAA division in football? D3
  3. Thomas More University competes in which NCAA division in football? D2

Capacity, to the seat

No ranges. No "about." The bank wants the number.

  1. What is the seating capacity of McColl–Richardson Field at Jerry Richardson Stadium (Charlotte)? 15,314
  2. What is the seating capacity of Clarence T. C. Ching Athletics Complex (Hawaii)? 15,194
  3. What is the seating capacity of Centennial Bank Stadium (Arkansas State)? 30,406
  4. What is the seating capacity of Center Parc Stadium (Georgia State)? 24,333

He played where?

  1. Bubby Brister played college football at which school? ULM
  2. Wes Hopkins played college football at which school? SMU
  3. J.J. Johnson played college football at which school? Mississippi State
  4. Adrian Klemm played college football at which school? Hawaii

Heisman, the deep cuts

  1. Who won the Heisman Trophy in 1971? Pat Sullivan
  2. Who won the Heisman Trophy in 1973? John Cappelletti
  3. Who won the Heisman Trophy in 1977? Earl Campbell

Champions from the film era

  1. Which school won the college football national championship in 1976? Pitt
  2. Which school won the college football national championship in 1981? Clemson

Date the photograph

Our stadium photo games include historic photos. The bank asks when they were taken, to the decade.

  1. A historic photo of Harvard Stadium (home of Harvard) featured in this game dates to which decade? 1900s
  2. A historic photo of Laird Stadium (home of Carleton College) featured in this game dates to which decade? 1920s

Draft archaeology

  1. In which round of the NFL Draft was Randy Bethel selected? Round 10
  2. Which NFL team drafted Omar Easy? Kansas City Chiefs

How the deep end is built

Start with the proportions. The deep tier is not a garnish on the bank, it is most of it: 19,638 of the bank's 37,202 questions sit at difficulty 3, against just 2,741 at difficulty 1. That is why a long Sudden Death run stops feeling like a quiz and starts feeling like an archive with a timer. The questions above also span a fair range of the tier's cruelty: the four capacity answers run from 15,194 to 30,406 seats, and every one of them has to be hit exactly.

Here is the part the bank does not advertise. Most of the deep tier is not like the questions above. Of its 19,638 questions, 16,850 ask one of two things about a drafted player: which round, or which team. The tier is a draft archaeology dig, thousands of names the league used and forgot, and Sudden Death's ramp leans on it harder the longer you survive, until a run is nothing but deep-tier questions from question 21 onward. We deliberately built the 25 above from the tier's other 2,788 questions, the stadiums and capacities and photo dates, because a page of nothing but "which round was he drafted in, and by whom" would be a cry for help.

That mix is also the design lesson. Obscurity is not one thing. Some of these questions are hard because the school is tiny (Simpson College, Shenandoah). Some are hard because the answer is a number nobody memorizes to the unit (15,194 seats, at Hawaii). Some are hard because the player was famous and the school still will not come (Bubby Brister at ULM). And two are hard because the evidence is a photograph older than the sport's modern shape. A good survival game needs all four kinds, because different fans fall at different fences.

Your score is not the point

If you got five, you are dangerous. If you got fifteen, you should be writing this site. The deep tier is where Sudden Death sends you once the streak gets serious, and one wrong answer ends the run. The full bank is in Gridiron Trivia if you want the friendlier floors first. Either way, somewhere in a database there is a question about the seating capacity of a stadium in Hawaii, stated to the exact seat, waiting for somebody to get it wrong.

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