Some Site News!

My name is Lincoln Garrett. I have many things to share, so let’s get to it.

Who am I?

In a previous life I debated at Liberty University from 2008-2012. I coached at Liberty a year after graduating. That year (2013) a partnership that started as novices cleared at the NDT.

I then went to coach at the University of Kentucky for the next nine topics, up until 2021. During that time, we had teams make it to the octafinals and quarterfinals of the NDT, we cleared three teams at the NDT and it culminated in 2019 with winning the NDT and the Copeland award. 

Meanwhile, I coached high school teams with the most time spent with Montgomery Bell Academy. They won a lot of tournaments during that time including the 2020 TOC.

I taught at the Georgetown, Gonzaga and Dartmouth camps. There are still some kids from those camps circulating around college debate. Takes a long time to truly know none of the active debaters.

Where have I been?

I stopped coaching college debate full time in October 2021. I did participate in the online NDT in 2022. That NDT was the last tournament for which I judged. I did go and spectate the 2023 NDT. The 2023-24 college season involving the nukes topic is the season I know the absolute least about in terms of knowing the teams or what they were saying. The last high school topic I actively participated on was the water resources topic in 2021-22.

Since 2021 I have been developing the new day job which is managing fast food restaurants. These days I oversee 33 of them and I live in Parker CO, a suburb of Denver. 

So what brings me back to wanting to discuss debate on the internet?

Motivations

I have been up to a few things since being away. I started a serious relationship in 2024. She has three kids. That re-exposed me in a new way to public schools. Read a lot of books. I watched a lot of movies. I followed the 2025 NDT closely, even watched a few of the debates in full. And I also started being increasingly worried and engaged with certain trends, five in particular.

1. Literacy Crisis

I am mostly firmly in the Americans cannot read camp. We can quibble about technical literacy which is probably not uniquely worse by historical standards. Or we can focus on the spirit of the issue around attention spans, critical thinking and video substituting for reading. 

When I see all these types of articles and experience it directly in my own life I long for an activity which at its best at least requires people to read and think. 

2. AI Slop

Let me start with some positive thoughts. I like that AI can help people computer program. It can churn out simple automations that are helpful. And if you want to dialogue with your Google when you ask what month apples are in season or whatever, I guess that’s fine. 

AI cheating in school seems like a waste of time, but it does beg the question if the schooling offered in the first place is worth something. 

Literacy and AI slop overlap in a pernicious way when you are bombarded by AI video nonsense. Maybe they fed a paper to an AI bot that produced that video and mangled the source. Maybe the video is literally lying, who knows?

You got websites dressing up LLMs as people. You got people just straight posting ChatGPT essays. One presumes that we will reach a death spiral where the LLMs are trained on LLM slop as fact and it continues to get worse from there. Never been a better time to brush up on your Baudrillard. 

But the ultimate impact from AI slop is the opportunity for people to completely turn off their brains and outsource as much of their thinking as possible. This opportunity exists in and out of debate. What a sad waste of time. What a retreat from a moment to live life.

It seems to me debate should be uniquely positioned to present itself as a bulwark against these trends of illiteracy and uncritical thinking. Actually growing the activity was something I did not do a good job of the first go around, but now I would like to invest some energy in that endeavor.

3. Algorithmic siloing

This has been a thing for a while. Social media sites create echo chambers and only show you stuff that fuel confirmation bias etc. I need to research this more, but it feels like in the last 5 years the algorithms have just gotten better at this? Or every site works like this now? It feels like it has intensified. Maybe it is because people are more aggressively brandishing their stupidity these days, I am not sure. 

But I think debate should be out front and center and say switch side debate is one of the best correctives to algorithms both frying people’s attention spans and the echo chambers these sites create. 

4. Debate History

I have always been greatly interested in debate’s history. A lot of stuff in society writ large seems to be disappearing. Dead links. Dead videos. Sites disappearing. TV shows and movies you can’t even to pay to watch anymore. It is grim out there. 

These things impact debate as well. Old articles, old files, eDebate archives, old websites like debateresults… dust in the wind.

There is a variety of things debate can do to promote and archive its history better. I hope to pursue some of those. 

Then there is what is going on in the debates. It looks like we are losing some recipes. Even with the internet getting worse compared to 6 or 7 years ago it is still a golden age of being able to do research, but that doesn’t seem to be reflected in the docs. I want to do some reminding of what high quality research looks like.

5. Debate Promoting and Teaching

I have always been interested in debate in a classroom setting, mainly debate camp. Educational thinking and policy has always been a side interest of mine. I am interested in ways to make debate participation grow. 

What’s the best way to teach debate? What’s the best way to get people hooked? How to make debate more fun? How to make debate cheaper? All questions that have gripped me off and on over the last 15 years and have fueled my interest in returning.

Bearing Gifts

The above is what I have been thinking about the last 6 months. Those thoughts have fueled some actions. I come bearing gifts. 

1. First Round Results

I put all the college National Debate Tournament regular season rankings, also known as first round results, since they began in 1971 in one place. Now you can figure out: who got 1, 2, 3, or 4? How many does a school have? Who won the Copeland in X year? All in one place.

2. Theory Library

In an effort to not have a useful thing die, this site now features the Theory Library assembled by Casey Harrigan. Preserve debate history!

3. Video Database

It could just be me, but I think Youtube search features are increasingly worthless. I think it is very hard to find things on Youtube. I also think a lot of the videos you will see on Youtube are dead links. 

What I have done is two things. First, I added every video in my possession to the collection. There are some debates from the 90’s and early 00’s in here. Lot of debates from 2010-11 which was my peak recording year as a participant. Second, I added pretty much every college debate I could find already on Youtube, but now it comes with an interface where you can actually search through the videos. These videos are unlisted, because the project is not really about Youtube clicks. It is about preservation + making the resource more usable. 

If you have videos to add, let me know!

4. Debate Musings Archive

Articles from my old site, Debate Musings, are now hosted on this site. You can find them here.

5. Announcement next week

Truf and I have a new component to this site we are starting next week. Check back in!

6. Big Secret Project

I hope to bring another big gift to you soon, but it is not done yet. Hopefully it will be finished in September. It is going to be a good one!

What’s the Plan?

I am going to tournaments again. I will be at the college season opener. I am going to branch out and look into not just policy but LD and PF as well. 

I am going to post articles again. I am going to post ideas. I am going to post reactions and advice. That’s what you can expect in the short term.

Over the longer term – there is a lot of projects on the ideas list. The main ones are:

—pursuing video where it makes sense and actually makes a project better. 

—doing interviews on a whole range of subjects.

—producing more resources like the ones listed above that are useful for teaching and coaching and fun for debate nerds.  

I do not want to work for a university. I do not want to work for a school district. I do not particularly want to coach a singular school. I want to help create things that debate should have had this whole time. I want debate to grow. I want the debating in rounds to be better. But I want to pursue these things on my own terms compared to my previous life as a full-time debate coach. We can just do things and those things can make debate reach new heights.  If you agree with those sentiments, keep tabs on this site – any support you can give is greatly appreciated and will be used in pursuit of these goals.