This week's bizarre High School Basketball Score

I would say any league where you're representing a school or a town competitively where the balance of teams can't be changed by an in-house convener who can make trades or balance rosters if they're not fair. Those leagues are for fun, though I don't think the "don't keep score, everyone wins" crowd has it right there, either. Winning and losing is a life lesson and it is up to leagues and administrators to ensure the playing field is as fair as possible.

Leagues certainly should be construed to include teams that have similar population/draw area (or school size), similar resources, and maybe even dictated by coaching and recent success. I really don't think teams want to embarrass teams that much weaker than them, but they also have future games to think about and have playing styles they want to play. I'm going to agree with Starman that automatic mercy rules are a good thing too.

 

Small thing that needs to be pointed out because everyone seems to be bringing it up, the Arroyo Valley and Bloomington game wasn't a league contest. They both play in the Southern Section of CIF, but separate leagues. IIRC, the Southern Section does have a mercy rule where you go to a running clock in the fourth quarter if a team is winning by 40.

Arroyo Valley scheduled a cream-puff that is 1-60 going back to the 2011/12 season.

 

It's a far cry from not keeping score and everybody gets a trophy to this.

 

So what do you want them to do? Just pass the ball around for 60 minutes and make the poor girls on the losing team feel even more helpless and pathetic? No. You play the game, you play your whole bench, and you just hope that no one on either side gets hurt. I've been on both sides of these (not 161-2, but blatantly one-sided games) and it's not easy for either.

As for the team scheduling a cream puff, why did the cream puff agree to play this game (especially when people apparently knew this coach would do such a thing)? Did they get some cash under the table or something? My high school, which was in a border town in Canada, used to have some sort of arrangement where we'd go over to play a team in Michigan, get our asses handed to us 70-0 or so and get a cheque for doing so. It was a lousy way to make a buck and have all your players embarrassed and ripped to shreds in the press. Eventually, we stopped doing it.

 

Actually if you're on the team that is being humiliated hurting them isn't a bad idea.

161-2 is beyond a reasonable explanation..

 

A score of 161-2, in a fully voluntarily-scheduled game between a juggernaut known for running up scores and a basket case with a record of 1-60 in the last 3 seasons, with the losing team committing a total of two fouls in the whole game, after which the losing coach makes harrumphy morally-superiority comments, looks to me like the losing coach told his players from the opening tip: "stand there and let them score, don't even take any shots, we'll let them win by 100, 150 points, then we'll call the newspapers and play the boo-hoo victim card and get nationwide media sympathy."

And it worked.

 

I don't disagree with this...

... but this is batshit crazy.

 

Nope.


To lose a game by 160 points, to commit two fouls in the entire game, to carry on after the game as if the 160-point loss was some soul-crushing lifelong tragedy for the players, smells an awful lot like nothing more (or less) than a setup to play the victim card.


In other words, if this loss was such a soul- scorching experience, you'd think somebody would have been motivated enough to stay close enough to their player on D to foul them a few times.

Unless and until the video of this game comes out, I am going with the intentional-tank boo-Hoo victim card theory.

 

By all accounts the winning team kept the full-court press on for the entire first half, building a 104-1 lead.

Once it gets to 25 points (which would have been about midway through the first quarter), you call off the press; after the first quarter you bench your starters; and as time goes on you institute the three-pass (or four or five) rule.

Nobody is gaining anything from a game like this, the winners or the losers.

 

This.

At some point, you get more out of practice than you do in the game.
Two of the girls had triple-doubles (points, assists, steals). One girl was three steals and two blocks away from a quadruple-double. If you're the winning team, you learned you can beat up the little kid on the playground. If you're the losing team, you learned as much as Stan Marsh's hockey team did when it took on the Detroit Red Wings.

 

Once again, if I am the losing coach and it's 90-1 at halftime or whatever it was, and I look down the sideline and see them furiously compiling stats, I tell my players to intentionally start shooting in the wrong basket to screw up all of their scoring averages.

Also: Players and coaches get thrown out of the game after two technicals. I'd tell all my players in a row up and down the roster to punt the ball up into the upper deck whenever they got their hands on it. Pretty soon my whole roster would have tech-fouled out. At some point the ref has to invoke the 'travesty of the game' clause; why not help them do it a lot faster?

 

40-point leads in fourth quarter = running clock in Central Section of CIF as well. Since one of the girls teams we cover had a habit of doing this consistently in league, in the newsroom, we'd declare whoever gave the winners a 40-point lead the "player of the game."

The difference is all in how it's handled. As Cal-Hi Sports pointed out last week, Stockton St. Mary's defeated Lodi Tokay 109-17 last week, without the fuss the SoCal game is attracting.