4/3-4/10: Offense Only Rebuttals
Tournament Update
Due to the conclusion of the season, LD and PF debaters did not compete at bid tournaments this past weekend. Best of luck to everyone preparing for NDCA and the TOC, and stay tuned for future tournament results!
VBI 2024 Staff Announcement
We are so excited to start announcing our instructors for VBI 2024! Every week, you’ll get a chance to learn more about the talented staff working at VBI this summer. This week’s staff feature is PF instructor Arnav Mehta.
Arnav Mehta debated for 4 years at Seven Lakes High School. During those 4 years, Arnav accumulated 23 total TOC Bids and was ranked as high as number 2 in the nation. Arnav won Grapevine twice, won UH twice, won UT, won ALTA, reached finals at Glenbrooks and Blake, and got 3rd at TFA. In addition, Arnav reached late rounds at TOC, Emory, Blue Key, Apple Valley, Churchill, and many more. He looks forward to teaching at VBI!
Offense Only Rebuttals
by Akhil Bhale
As long as I’ve been involved in Public Forum debate, the rebuttal speeches have always followed a certain arrangement. The first rebuttal purely attacks the other case, reading a combination of offense, defense, and sometimes weighing. The second rebuttal reads frontlines to the responses from the first rebuttal, and reads responses to the other case. Adhering to this structure gives stability and makes back-half speeches predictable from a format perspective, making sense why it has been the norm for many years now.
However, I believe this structure of rebuttal is extremely overdone. Specifically, my problem lies with the amount of defensive arguments read in the rebuttal speeches. Not only does this make debates boring and often too predictable, but it also makes debaters risk-averse. Thus, second speakers should experiment with new strategies, take unorthodox approaches, and in general, read strategic and contextual arguments that serve more purpose in the back-half.
Second speakers should more often read 4 minutes of pure offense in their rebuttal speeches.
Reading only offense or at the very least, majority offense, in the rebuttal speech is more strategic. Offense wins you rounds and so having x more pieces of offense (past what you have already read in constructive), gives you that many more paths to the ballot. This is better than the alternative too: defensive arguments serve no real purpose in the back-half because unless that argument is a uniqueness or link takeout that zeros case, the other team will always get to weigh a risk of offense.
Reading purely offense can entail many different things. To me, new advantages and disads in the rebuttals are acceptable, and then you’re obviously free to read standard link turns. Rebuttals that read good impact turns with modules of compelling impact defense also fit this category. Basically, you want to be reading arguments that can both, catch your opponents off-guard, as well as give you the best chance to win the round.
This is not something exclusive to the first rebuttal either. Granted it appears to make more sense for the first rebuttal to be the only rebuttal that reads purely offense since they don’t need to frontline. However, the second rebuttal can do the same too. Second rebuttals have always had time dedicated to responding to the first rebuttal and this makes sense if there is defense being read, but there is no rule saying that YOU HAVE TO respond to the first rebuttal in the second rebuttal. Assuming the first rebuttal read purely offense, the second rebuttal is free to do the same, without responding to the first rebuttal offense. Similarly, if the first rebuttal didn’t read purely offense, then the second rebuttal is still free to read purely offense. However in this situation, going for case later might be unstrategic and abusive (arguable).
Reading purely offense in the rebuttal has implications for the rest of the debate; it makes summary strategy much more innovative. You have many different pieces of offense to collapse on and so you can craft your strategy based on which of your pieces of offense interacts the best with your opponent’s pieces of offense. Assuming both rebuttals were purely offensive, the summaries have to worry less about frontlining and more on creating smart interaction and unconventional weighing. This opens the Pandora box of different turns case arguments, short-circuit arguments, timeframe arguments, actor analysis and more. Moreover, in topics where uniqueness controls the direction of the link for core arguments on both sides (ex. Deterrence vs escalation), purely offensive rebuttals of these arguments can make summaries very robust in terms of comparison and weighing.
Many will say this sort of strategy discourages clash and encourages sand-bagging. There is some merit to this concern but I ask you to think about how many debates seemed to be scripted, or too predictable, and how many of them seemed devoid of good clash. Debates nowadays result in defense being neglected in the back-half anyway, with bad (and late) attempts to weigh. It would be better if defense wasn’t read to begin with, and summaries were FORCED to start and flesh out the weighing debate sooner. Moreover, good teams who read purely offense will engage with their opponent’s weighing well, producing the same clash we love.
Akhil Bhale debated for Westwood High School in Austin, Texas for 3 years. In his career, he qualified to the TOC twice and earned 8 career bids. Serving as PF captain for two years, his notable achievements include getting 7 bids his senior year, winning the Longhorn Classic at UT Austin, winning the Kandi King round robin, semi-finaling the Palm Classic at Stanford, and finaling the Cal Invitational at UC Berkeley. He made elimination rounds at Bellaire, Plano West, Blue Key, Emory and Churchill and was the 1st seed and an octofinalist at TFA state his junior year. Overall, Akhil was ranked #3 in the nation and #1 in Texas his senior year.