With the exception of my yearly $5 bet with Lawrence on Gonzaga, I don’t give a flying flip at a rolling doughnut about college basketball.
However, the remarkable achievement of the Grambling men’s basketball team must be noted here: “…at 0-27, they became the only men’s basketball team in Division I to finish the regular season without a victory.”
How bad is Grambling?
Nineteen of the Tigers’ 27 losses came by 20 points or more. They have not lost a game by less than 10…
…They rate last among 345 Division I teams in offense, the only one with an average below 50 points a game (49.6), and 340th in defense, having allowed 77 points a game. They struggle to score when the clock is running, shooting a 342nd-best 36.3 percent, and when it is stopped, hitting a 343rd-best 58.5 percent of their free throws. Shots are hardly plentiful to begin with; they have been outrebounded by 7.2 a game, making the Tigers better than only three teams in the country.
To be fair, Grambling has been hit hard by NCAA penalties tied to their low academic progress rate. Grambling also has funding issues, which have lead the team to adopt the role of “cupcake opponent” for hire:
Grambling played just nine home games, all against other teams from the Southwestern Athletic Conference. In one arduous span, Grambling lost at Houston, Texas Tech, Oregon State, Auburn and Southern Mississippi by an average of 41 points.
And this is amusing:
Time has not run out on the Tigers’ season. They play Alabama A&M again Wednesday in the conference tournament, part of a seven-team field shrunk by the absence of other academic progress underperformers and a rules violator.
At least, it’s amusing to Lawrence and I and anyone else who remembers the “Charlie Tuna Oceanographic University” series of strips from “Tank McNamara”. (CTOU ended up playing in the Rose Bowl because every other team in the conference had been sanctioned by the NCAA.)
This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 5th, 2013 at 8:39 am and is filed under Clippings, Loser, Sports. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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