Troy State 253, DeVry 141: Pretty Good, Episode 12

This is the longest and strangest episode of Pretty Good I have ever made. Troy State’s reported 258-141 demolition of DeVry’s Decatur basketball team would have been strange enough on its own. The result of forty minutes of near-uninterrupted fast-break basketball was a score so high that Sartain Hall’s scoreboard, which could not display a number above 199, was powerless to process the magnitude of what had happened.

No team, after all, had even scored 200 points at any level of the sport. It hasn’t even happened in the NBA All-Star Game, a contest that’s eight minutes longer than a college game, stacked with the world’s best shooters, and played largely without defense. For two college teams to combine for nearly 400 points requires a complete dismantling of basketball tradition.

It’s probably the strangest game in any sport that I have ever seen. As an attempt to properly size it up, I scored the game myself. My guess was that I’d find some odds and ends that no one had bothered to report, and I did find some of those. For instance, there were 44 dunks or attempted dunks in this game, and 7:03 of game clock — nearly 20 percent of the game — was spent with the ball mid-air in the process of being shot.

After counting up a final score of 253 for Troy State, I was annoyed with myself. Scoring the game took quite a while, and I had to do it all over again just because I’d forgotten to count five points somewhere. I scored it again, and ended up with 253 again. I began to wonder what I would later confirm: that the highest-scoring basketball game of all time has been printed in all the record books with the wrong score.

This episode of Pretty Good is the story of that game as well as a presentation of my case. (If you’re inclined to count it up yourself, you can watch the entire game here.)

Special thanks to Kristian Anttila and Peytona, who allowed me to use their music in this episode.

Since publishing this video on YouTube, I’ve come under fire for my method of cooking scrambled eggs as demonstrated near the 3:30 mark. “Gross” and “undercooked” are words I am hearing. I will not abandon this mountain. Traditional scrambled eggs are great, but I’m telling you: ten minutes of low heat, constant stirring, and patience will end with the most delicious scrambled eggs you have ever eaten.

Here are some charts.