The Worst Game
IUPUI-Chicago State and the case for the underdog
There are two sides to every coin.
For every glorious matchup between Gonzaga and Texas, Kentucky and Kansas, North Carolina and Duke, there is an opposite matchup. These games rarely get talked about, shoved onto YouTube for view counts in the single-digits on weekday nights. They are the games that fill out schedules all around the country for teams that, on the betting slips and in the bracketologists’ offices, comprise the “forgotten” mass.
Take, for example, the current bottom five on Ken Pomeroy’s ranking site:
Each one of these teams is simply atrocious — the lone win in there is Delaware State’s triumph over Immaculata, a non-Division I foe. Not one win in 11 tries against Division I competition, with losses to the tune of 64 and 49 points apiece — Mississippi Valley State vs. Baylor and IUPUI vs. Iowa State, respectively.
Many of these games are buy games — funding the athletic program by taking repeated beatings on the court or field, getting a guaranteed check, a meal, and maybe transportation covered. For small schools, it’s a way of life in the early months of the season, and most people don’t really think much about that aspect of it when the scoreline reads Portland 91, Florida A&M 54.
Once these teams — and many others — get into the conference season, things open up somewhat. While these are the worst of the worst, generally conference season begets opportunities to play more evenly matched competition. It’s why it is extremely rare for a team to lose every single one of their games over a full season.
To find the last time this happened, you have to go back to the 2012-13 Grambling State Tigers, a team that finished with an Adjusted Efficiency Margin (AdjEM) of -46.10 on KenPom (in essence, that team was 46 points worse than the average D1 team over 100 possessions — and a full 79 points worse than the top team that year). Even the 2020-21 Mississippi Valley State team that finished at -41.29 — next closest to that Grambling team and the bottom since 2002 — was able to eke out a pair of wins.
Bad teams get to play bad teams eventually, and though these are the games that, like I mentioned, are the ones that you sort of have to slog through on the ESPN scoreboard to find, they’re still battles that matter to a lot of people.
Our bottom five teams pair off pretty nicely for two of our three “worst games of the year”:
1/16: #359 Florida A&M has a conference tilt with #362 Mississippi Valley State, total AdjEM -49.71
2/7: #360 Chicago State gets #361 Delaware State, total AdjEM -50.44
There’s one more, though, worse than both of those.
11/14: #360 Chicago State plays #363 IUPUI, total AdjEM -52.35
Those of you with keen eyes will notice that that’s tonight! Arguably the worst game of the year, and it’s happening on Day 8 of the young season, on a Monday night in November.
Here’s the thing.
This is going to be a bad game as defined by metrics, yes. It’s probably going to fail the eye test. This is not the sort of competition between two March Madness locks that a lot of people are going to be turning their TVs to — especially not on the same night that a host of ranked teams play. There are dozens of objectively better options to tune in to — Houston, Baylor, TCU, and Texas Tech all tip at the same time as IUPUI-Chicago State — but I’m here to make the case that you should watch this game.
Part of what makes college basketball so wonderful is the depth to which fans commit to their schools. IUPUI, a team so devastated by injuries that they fielded just five players for the last month of last season, and Chicago State, a team that was in effect booted from a conference that explicitly built their geography away from them, are two prime examples of teams that, in many other situations, would be hung out to dry. Instead, people keep with them. People follow these teams in earnest, hoping that this is going to be the one where the Jags pull it off, or that this might be the time the Cougars get over that hump.
Though I’m a Minnesota fan by birth and a Pepperdine fan because I went there, I’m a Chicago State and IUPUI fan because their underdog stories are particularly appealing. My parents always used to laugh a little bit at my misery in picking the dogs in life because I was doing it to myself — but then again, I used to think, if I didn’t, who would? Lots of people, as it turns out.
Games like this are a reminder that, under the commercialization and the betting and all of the frankly gross storylines that emerge regarding collegiate athletics on what feels like a weekly basis, there are still places where the hoops swish with the sound of baskets made more for the love of the game than for tournament bids. I watch hundreds of games a year between horrendous teams for no greater reason than to see the crowds go wild when MVSU gets their first win, when UAPB keeps it close against a TCU team that should have run them to Narnia, when Chicago State gets its first conference win in five years, when IUPUI’s five guys manage to sneak one away, because it is beautiful.
It may not be good, but it is good, and if we don’t celebrate that, then what’s the point?
