Okay then: South Carolina’s women’s basketball team defeats Mississippi Valley, 101-19
A year or two ago, a friend of mine sent me a link to a stream of a high school girls basketball game, that a guy we went to high school with was coaching. I clicked it out of curiosity, since this guy in question was one of those guys where nothing in the world ever seems to treat him particularly well, and my friend isn’t one to steer me to dud content, and when the stream began for me, I noticed that the score was like 31-3.
I texted my friend and said that I thought that maybe the stream was broken or something, because the score seemed to be stuck at 31-3, but then I noticed in actual manual scoreboard in the video itself, which was still live and moving, and I had one of those ohhhhhh moments, because it turns out that the score was actually, 31-3. Naturally, my friend’s boy was the coach of the team that had only put up three points, and we laughed heartily over the ownage we were witnessing, because we do love some good old fashioned ownage.
I don’t remember what the final score was, but I don’t think my friend’s boy’s team surpassed ten points. I do remember watching on the stream that after the clock mercifully ended, he stormed immediately off the court; no handshaking the opposing coach, no handshake line between the two teams.
My in-laws are both sports fans as well as supporters of South Carolina sports, so when they were over during the holiday weekend, and while the girls were down for a nap/quiet time, we turned on the Lady Gamecocks since they were playing live at the time. It was the third quarter, and the score was like 62-12, and I immediately had flashbacks to the high school game that my friend and I watched, and my first thought was that the ESPN feed was fucked up or something, and that the score was not refreshing maybe.
But it turned out that South Carolina really was wrecking Mississippi Valley that badly, and mythical wife, who is neither a fan of basketball or women’s hoops, began complaining of why we were watching at all, considering the game was long past over at this juncture. I mean, I like a good blowout every now and then, but there’s no denying that it does get kind of boring after a while and both teams begin just going through the motions to get debacle over with. I was more surprised that there was no running clock or something to speed things up, and prevent MSV from getting throttled even more than they were.
We turned the game off in after the third, because the margin was only getting worse, but then I would discover later on that South Carolina passed the 100-point mark which is very impressive at the college level, men or women, and that they blew out MSV by 82 points.
Now it’s not as easy as it should be, so I can’t figure out where in history that an 82-point blowout stands in rank. I did find out that at one point, UConn reamed St. Francis in the Women’s tournament by a margin of 88 points, but beneath that was a whole lot sub-70 point blowouts, so South Carolina’s 82-point margin definitely is up there in the history books somewhere.
For context, the biggest ass-whooping in NBA history was 73 points, and in the NFL, a 59-0 blowout has occurred twice, so an 82-point beatdown is definitely noteworthy and worth some mention on the brog. Regardless of where the margin lands in history, it’s still historic in the sense that 19 points allowed is a new school record, and is definitively the largest blowout in the Dawn Staley coaching era for the school, so it’s not inaccurate to say that we were witnessing a little bit of history after all.
