The Top Five Conference Tournament Blowouts Ever
College Hoop Highway 4
Good afternoon, and welcome to The Low Major! We’re so glad you could join us in celebrating the magic of college basketball’s conference tournament season. It’s a time when anyone (well, almost anyone) can see their dreams become reality, and in starting this newsletter, we feel a similar sense of enchantment.
Conference tournaments didn’t become mainstream until the late 1970s and early ‘80s, when conferences finally became allowed to send more than one team to the NCAA Tournament1 and it began to make sense to allow more teams than just the regular season champion to receive the conference’s automatic bid. However, the history of conference tournaments stretches back much further: every major conference in the South has run a conference tournament for essentially their entire existence.2 The ACC’s dates back to 1954, the Ohio Valley’s to 1949, the SEC’s to 1933, and the Southern Conference’s a full century to 1922.
In all, 11,401 major conference tournament games have been played in men’s college basketball. Here are all of them,3 with different sheets sorted by year, by conference, by total points scored, and by scoring margin. It’s the last of these which I’d like to highlight.
Fans love conference tournaments because of the high possibility for a tense, high-stakes, back-and-forth game. Most conference tournament games fit this description. Some are anything but. In researching a different topic some time ago, I was reminded of Louisville’s 61-point drubbing of Rutgers in the 2014 American Athletic Conference Tournament.4 A recap of this game noted that it was the greatest margin of victory in a conference tournament game since 1993 Kentucky dismantled Tennessee in the SEC Tournament, also by 61 points.5 Both of these teams were coached by Hall-of-Famer Rick Pitino. My next question, of course, was whether this was the greatest conference tournament margin of victory of all time. I couldn’t find a public source conveniently listing every conference tournament result,6 so I set out to answer that question myself.
As it turns out, 61 points is not only not the greatest all-time conference tournament margin of victory, it wouldn’t even reach the podium. Three conference tournament games have finished as even more stupefyingly massive blowouts. Please join me in discovering these games that should not be.
This is College Hoop Highway 4.
This became true starting with the 1974-75 season. The season prior, Maryland – ranked 4th in the AP Poll – missed the NCAA Tournament because the ACC just so happened to have a buzzsaw in #1 NC State, to whom they lost in the conference tournament final 103-100 in overtime.
It just means more.
As far as I can tell, this is the only place on the internet in which all of this data is available in one spot. This research took several hours a day over approximately two weeks.
Final score: 92-31.
Final score: 101-40.
Which…fair. Why would that have existed? Why did I create it?