Musings on the Northwestern Season Opener '25

1. Tournament at a Glance

Michigan BP wins! 7-1 in prelims. 4^th seed. Three split decisions. Only loss this weekend was Emory GS.

18 Negative Elim wins vs 10 Affirmative. Side bias indeed.

Upsets galore:

• 3^rd seed Binghamton losing to 30^th seed Kansas.
• 13^th seed UTD losing to 20^th seed Michigan.
• 5^th seed Georgetown losing to 28^th seed West Georgia.
• 1^st seed Kansas losing to 9^th seed CSU Long Beach
• 2^nd seed MSU losing to 15^th seed Northwestern. Northwestern LR beat 2^nd seed MSU, 7^th seed Kansas WW and 6^th seed Emory GS on the road to the finals. 

2. Preseason Preparation

One could argue the season exists in three phases. You have the first tournament, then you have a bunch of tournaments where you have a lot more known information and then you have the last tournament. Each of these is its own muscle and some excel more in a particular phase than others

The preseason phase is a fun one because:

• it’s the longest
• you can miscalculate by being too willing to say “no one is going to say that”
• you can create too long of an ideas list that paralyzes you
• a cabin fever can set in because of all the internal back and forth debating you have to do (you write a thing, you have to imagine the answers, you have to write answers to the answers, you have to think if you missed anything, you have to think is that the best answer available, you have to think if your answers are good enough vs the best answer etc etc)

For example, Kansas, MSU, Emory and Northwestern all read Federal Workers. Being able to say you had a plan when negative for Federal Workers is a nice start, but we can dig deeper:

Did you know that the main affirmative articles were Fisk 25 and Handler 24?

These affirmatives share themes, but chose to support them in different ways. MSU and NU talked about democratic backsliding, Kansas did not. They all talk about the administrative state, but MSU and NU’s impacts are broader and more nebulous (although you could say NU finally gets specific with ageing crisis on a separate page), Kansas said warming, readiness and pandemics. All the plan texts are different. They all read different evidence to impact Trump loyalists being bad. NU read four impacts, MSU read three and Kansas read five. 

How much of this were you aware of before the tournament started? Cleaning up your Federal Workers neg by Kentucky is a straight forward task when everyone’s cards are on the table. Not needing to because you predicted the whole board is much more impressive. 

3. Winning the 1^st Tournament 

If your actual goal was to win the first tournament (you are not just fronting, you put in a sufficient amount of time in the preseason for that to be a thing), what would you need to do?

In one sense what you need to win the 1^st tournament is similar to winning any tournament – you need to break arguments. Breaking arguments is the main thing you have control over that can significantly alter your probability of winning a debate. The hierarchy of new arguments is:

• new affirmatives (biggest win probability shift)
• new negative off case
• new advantages (smallest shift/more easily defeated than the other two things)

If you are in the winning tournament business you have to set the pace and make other people react, not the other way around.

4. Demonstrating Range

When I say range, I mean two things. First, the scope of arguments that appear in a 1NC. Second, the ability and willingness to extend anything you put in the 1NC.

Range is a muscle that has been critically declining for a while. I am not going to say range is necessary for winning rounds or tournaments, people can win on the same thing over and over again, but I would say these narrow debaters win less often. But more importantly debate is infinitely more fun when debaters demonstrate range.

Range should have never gone out of style. Why?

Ultimately, everything in debate is a function of substance vis a vis time. Worse arguments can win because of time factors. Good arguments can “create time” by being harder to answer. 

This makes debates unique because you are not just arguing against your opponents. You are also arguing against yourself: against the evidence you do not possess, the evidence you chose not to read and the different version of that speech you could give. 

If the 2AC makes three answers to ASPEC, there is an ideal 2NC to be given on that position that fits into an ideal block given the rest of the 2AC. “Is ASPEC the best argument?” is less relevant than “what is the best version of ASPEC?” Even more relevant – if your opponent has the best version of ASPEC and you half ass answering it because “the argument is bad” or “no one will go for that” you have ceded the advantage to your opponent and increased your odds of losing.

Usually a few teams really try to go for topicality hard. Did not really happen at this one. Did a policy team beat another policy team on a topic K? Not that I saw. Lots of different DA’s mainly. 

5. Preseason List

I would suggest doing prediction work 30 days before the first tournament then checking back in on your predictions 5 to 7 days before and then seeing how you did.

• Three biggest affirmatives: sectoral bargaining, federal workers and secondary strikes. This part was pretty straightforward. 
• CPs: States, Antitrust, Devolution/Experimentation, Equity, Rights PIC and Advantage CP’s about inequality and democracy. 
• CP slop: Uncooperative Federalism, Congressional Review Act, Catastrophic Risk Review, Impeachment CP, Con Con (not a comprehensive list of slop from previous topics or what was read at NUSO)
• DAs: Economy, Interest Rates, Agenda, Midterms, Court Clog, Federalism, Movements (this could go a lot of ways. Multiple teams talked about it and all were mostly different from one another). 

As far as the policy side of things, if you were aware all those things existed that’s a good start. Like going 5-3. Then the question is how many of those things could you get solved.

6. Preseason Riddles

Or maybe you spent all summer figuring out the best way to say “answer my riddles six or you lose”:

7. Turing Test

Michigan KM, and probably some teams after them, had a 1NC gimmick called the Turing Test. Don’t exactly remember what the CX question was but they would accuse you of this:

We administered a Turing Test to you in the 1ac cx; you failed it. We refuse to debate against robots for reasons of fairness and education—brink now; flips try or die
Stüvel 12. Sybren A. "Person or computer: could you pass the Turing Test?" May 2, 2012 4.34pm EDT http://theconversation.com/person-or-computer-could-you-pass-the-turing-test-6769

We have an unintentional spiritual successor to the Turing Test:

As presented this page does nothing. It points out the Golden Dome is bad. It will fund this bad thing if the FG ever does the plan. It has not yet said the Golden Dome is coming now and needs to be stopped.

The idea is “the DA” only links to the perm. However, why would you have to perm it? Typically you perm random CP’s that just do space colonization or whatever so they cannot try to win on CP is better than Affirmative. But that does not apply in this case. As presented the CP does nothing and there is nothing necessitating a perm.

“If and only if” CP’s usually fiat something good that stops if the plan happens, not ominously threaten to do something stupid if the plan happens.

The document I saw had the affirmative team answering Golden Dome bad with cards. I assume there was also a perm. So who really has the most egg on their face?

8. Non-Resolutional Theory

This is the idea the judge cannot vote affirmative on theory arguments because it doesn’t prove the resolution true or the plan good or whatever. This argument is not novel, but maybe the label is. We used to call this reasonability or substance crowd out. The 80s and 90s debated about the “punishment paradigm” and whether saying something was a voter for fairness and education was a good idea. That evolved into reject the argument not the team as a definitive resolution to most theory debates except conditionality. 

To me this line of argument seems like inefficient reasonability. The diatribes I heard on this were all quite long and seemed to rely on a shared assumption between judge and debater, a reliance that seemed unlikely to be justified. If you want to say the judge should have a high threshold on theory arguments because you don’t want to give the Affirmative mice a cookie… just say that. It is a better argument and much shorter. 

Saying there is a structural barrier to the judge voting on theory arguments sounds like something out of LD. It is random, out of step with custom and self-serving to the point most judges would ignore it. 

While I am here kind of talking about conditionality, your counter-interp cannot be “we get what we did.” You may need a counter-interp no matter what for contrived competing interpretation judges, but more importantly you forward an interpretation so you put some kind of cap on things and cannot be accused of “infinite conditionality.” “We get what we did” does not put a cap from an interpretation stand point because it does not preclude the next negative team reading more than you and “getting what they do.” Better to say “negative teams get 4” or whatever.

9. Kicking the Poem

1NC has a poem page. 1NR reads a new poem on the poem page. Lots of CX time and speech time is spent editorializing how everyone is treating, answering and respecting the poems. Then the 2NR kicks the poem page.

HELL NO!

You cannot kick the poems. Poems should not be risk-free options. Well they are, because they don’t really exist independently of whatever the main critique is and it is not clear what strategic value they add (highlighted by the fact the 2NR can cavalierly kick them whenever). But you don’t get to high horse on the poem page for 80% of the debate and then jettison it.

Affirmative teams take note – you should warn your judges to never trust what a poem kicker is saying.

10. Debating Case Turns

This is an evergreen issue, but I think we can crack it with a walkthrough example. Read through the following document, take some notes and guess what I am going to say.

1AC Notes

Does not have a strong "inequality ruins the economy" card. Doesn’t have a card that is clear on aggregate demand/secular stagnation. Only line says "government invested less in social good" and "harder to start businesses without social trust." Later on they have a card that does say: “Further, higher wages also enable workers to purchase more goods and services. Increased consumer demand gives firms an incentive to invest in new factories and products, which can create additional jobs.”

Does not have a card on social trust necessary for strong economy

Solvency card for productivity says this: “The research is very clear that unions raise wages and reduce inequality, but their effect on other economic outcomes such as productivity, economic growth, employment, and firm profitability depends heavily on the context, especially the response of management but also the specific firm, region, and time period under study.”

The plan can lead to productivity because of worker retention, morale and employers focusing on productivity enhancements like training or investing instead of squeezing wages.

Monopsony power is bad but doesn’t really connect that to how it ruins the economy

1NC Notes

"Productivity fine" card that says it is 2% (which the Affirmative said is not good enough).

Prediction card that says we will see better stats because of new business creation (new business claim is based on applications).

Unions are bad because they push wages above what productivity dictates, wages trade off with new capital creation, unions can stifle productive automation. Repetitive on this investment claim, says Germany disproves but then ambiguously claims most cases go negative without saying what they are. 

1nc card says stocks drop 1.04% and .72% when a company is unionizing.

Then they read Cardullo 15, and this is where research, preparation and thinking can really make a difference: “stronger union power also reduces the average level of labour productivity particularly in sunk capital intensive industries.” 

What’s a sunk capital intensive industry? Those industries where after you set up a factory or buy a machine you are stuck with it. The theoretical dynamic at play is: A. Boss buys expensive machines. B. Union asks for higher wages because they know the boss is stuck, not going to move or shut down. C. Boss knows this could happen so does not buy new expensive machine in the first place. 

The study explores OECD countries from 1980 to 2000. 

How much of the US economy would you say is in sunk capital industries? Are those key to the US economy? Who knows. 

Does the study ever quantify what they are saying? It sure does: "In particular, our set of estimates imply an investment differential of about 13% between a sector at the 75th percentile (Transport equipment) and one at the 25th percentile of the sunk capital intensity distribution (Leather products) in a country at the 25th percentile of the union coverage distribution (such as the United Kingdom) compared to a country at the 75th percentile of union coverage (such as Spain)."

Ya, I am shaking for the economy right now.

2AC/1AR Notes

Short term economy not doing good because of tariffs? Why read this? You can solve this through wage increases I suppose, but the negative has not really introduced a fast recession type DA. 

The better approach is to leverage the more structural and long term uniqueness arguments that slant affirmative but that would require different 1AC cards as mentioned above. Key affirmative themes are (these overlap some) – wages, inequality impacting demand, social trust and labor monopsony. 

Fine answer to automation given the negative only said the port example.

300 studies card is fine, but tagging it conservative propogranda is whatever. This is a card I would sneak in somewhere and say lit review of 300 studies proves or something. The article doesn’t really elaborate beyond that.

“Local bargaining workplaces are roughly 8 percentage points more likely to conduct both product and process innovations than non-bargaining workplaces.” Sick. Actually it is fine to dispute that narrow link question, could be cut shorter. 

You can already see at this point how this is not really adding up to anything. What is key to the economy? What link is the biggest? Affirmative is not addressing everything present in the 1NC.

Negative block

Ilzetzki ’21 – Higher wages causes layoffs (can you do that with unions? Aren’t they hard to fire? Would the affirmative make them hard to fire? Unclear)

Valtat ’19 – Innovation decreases by 3.3%. As you will see later the more impactful part of this article gets read later. 

Mansfield ’24 – Repeating the idea wages should be tied to productivity. Maybe unions create artificial deadweight (my phrase not theirs).

Shin 20 – A firm is unionized, then the capital expenditures scaled by total assets decrease by 3.2–3.8%, and the sum of capital and R&D expenditures decrease by 3.7–4.2% on average. All of these estimation results can be summarized as follows: labour unionization makes firm’s investment rise in human resource but fall in physical capital.

Maksimovic 25 – Controlling for industry, location, and other observable firm characteristics such as size, age, and human capital, unionized plants invest 3% less relative to non-unionized plants during the same period. 

Abraham ’19 – Doesn’t really say anything of consequence except: “This may be a reasonable economic evaluation of unions – whatever else they do, they raise compensation by redistributing profits from shareholders to employees.” I believe that is the affirmative’s goal.

Partridge ’19 – Card is about new zealand and says flexibility is good and automation could be good. I would deem this redundant with the 1NC card (and worse because it is old and about New Zealand).

Valtat ’19 – Unions can do cartel effects that burden new entrants or small firms causing monopoly problems. I like this line of argument from the negative. 

Valtat ’19 – Same thing, probably should just be one card.

Backus 19 – Fine card. It represents what is required for every thread introduced by either side. I would make it clearer by saying concentration dooms productivity.

Bradley ’17 – Says the same thing Cardullo 15 only in theoretical terms.

Palagashvili ’25 – Card is bad, doesn’t accomplish what the 300 studies card from the Affirmative says. Mainly because this person is lying.

Bringing it All Together

As presented we end up with 3 things

• a lot of tag lines and buzzwords
• a lot of tags that are difficult to flow beyond “unions hurt X, more ev”
• repetitive evidence

Not only does that make it hard to resolve in itself but this particular set of cards does next to nothing in terms of providing firm conclusions.

Do wage increases cause unemployment or does it redistribute income, boosting demand and thus netting out more jobs?

Do unions cause path dependences or lock in effects that encourage stagnation (this is basically what anyone talking about the 70s would be talking about) or are they good for productivity (retention, training, morale, etc etc.)

Some overlap but distinct enough – do unions harm small business or new entrants to a market? Do they create big firm advantages?

What is the most relevant thing to the economy right now? Inflation? Unemployment? Dynamism? Monopolies? Inequality? 

You have to map it out. You could say the Links need “impacts” for why they are key to the economy. You have to refute what the other team is actually saying specifically, not at a very broad level. 

Don’t introduce a thread if you are not going to own it and make it a complete idea that helps win a debate. Do not repeat yourself. 

11. Disclosure 

Lots of teams failing to update the wiki. Perhaps they do it after the tournament. I do not think that is good enough, particularly for a team competing in the elims or aspiring to. Update the wiki. Do not be a free rider. Northwestern LR = very good wiki. Michigan BP = stopped doing updates after day 1. Sad!

Congratulations to all the teams with good wiki’s. Well done.

I am sure there are people out there that continue to say DebateDocs is bad for surveillance edgelord reasons or whatever. Move on from that boring take. It has always been the case that the best nondisclosure can accomplish is a tax on the time of people who care the most. 

People who care the most are not the problem, some might say they are the dynamism that keeps debate going. That makes the time tax counterproductive. But there are two bigger problems with bad email chain or bad wiki practices. First, it harms the smaller programs and/or more ignorant debaters that need easy access to figure out what the hell is going on. Second, it fragments the archive, which should always be playing a bigger role in how debate positions itself. 

There are four elimination debates I could not tell you what happened. I could figure this out by the end of the day, but the harm has been done. 

We can have this reciprocal bond where you just let people know what the debates were about, not just those who ask, not just those who are your friends, not just those who have coaches who you want to judge you and to avoid angering them. Information does not need to be a connections game or an effort game. It can just be a reciprocal starting point that lifts all boats. We just have to stop saying “well actually…”

12. Plan Focus

As a dinosaur myself I consulted some other old timers. Our recollection was that around 2012 or 2013 you could not win a real debate on plan focus vs a K. Like in 2013 you sounded like a stock issues dinosaur saying plan or competitive alternative and you were dismissed. 

We did say evaluate arguments based off of the plan text. We said that to clash with framework arguments that rather explicitly said the plan text and/or fiated action did not matter/did not count. 

However, the argument was not really theoretical in a debate sense. It was a criterion for evaluating K arguments. Sometimes Ks talked about different levels of analysis. Sometimes Ks accused the 1AC of being the worst available version of how to do the Affirmative, even if that was not the most likely version. Sometimes things were described as zero-sum when that was not really the case. Sometimes the only point of departure between affirmative and negative was a metaphysical assumption, which is not the most rigorous thing to debate about. 

To me these themes are all substantive in a critical debate. Cards were always read to support these ideas. Like this:

When you debate-ify the rhetoric to be overly focused on fairness and you abandon reading evidence for why the kinds of debates you promote are good/better than the negative, you sound like a huge weenie.

Obviously you should make framework arguments. Obviously there is a reasonable argument to be had that evaluating the 1AC holistically makes the most sense, which includes the action of the plan. The main thing I heard from the speeches was “Ks are unfair.” I heard from many coaches that that’s been the go to argument for years. How?? Why?? When I went to tournaments in 2010 there was a reasonable chance that you would encounter no critical debates at all. It was not the most likely thing but it did happen. 

Fast forward to 2012 and 2013 and that was no longer the case. Many a team crashed against the rocks trying to land “Ks are unfair.” I need to collect more data, but I am shocked in the resurgence of this line of argument.

See you at Kentucky.