The 88th Scripps National Spelling Bee is over and your winner is….Vanya Shivashankar and Gokul Venkatachalam. That’s right, we have co-champions but is that really the right way to go? Think about it, those two have worked so hard learning all these words and going through this classic dog and pony show where they end up sharing the championship? Both of them must believe they can out-spell the other, if that’s a thing, so why isn’t the list of words longer? Gokul was third in last years Spelling Bee, so I am sure he wanted that win. This is the second year in a row that co-winners were declared. The last time co-champions were declared before that? 1962. So what kind of competition just ends in a tie? I mean, the Superbowl wouldn’t end in a tie. An NBA game doesn’t just end if the scores tied. Baseball could go on and on. Sports are made to declare a winner, and the others losers. Or at least naming them less winners than the real number one winner. Then again, we are dealing with kids so maybe once you get to that point, it’s ok to say, “Hey these two are really good spellers, let’s go home”. I am sure that people fall on both sides of the debate and after the kids exhausted the list of words some of us that get excited watching any competition may have been shocked to see it end with so little drama while others probably felt the two have been put through enough and deserve to both be called champions. The rest of us were probably still scratching our head over the Drake mixtape sentence. Should the National Spelling Bee end in a tie? What say you?