Piling on - Massachusetts version

[Hawkmoon]

http://www.newser.com/story/256112/superintendent-apologizes-after-93-7-hs-basketball-game.html

Girls' basketball game ends with the score 93-7, and the winners kept their first string in until almost the end.

There almost has to be more to this story. This wasn't a regular season game (in which case I'd be asking why two so obviously mis-matched teams were even playing), this was the first round of the state tournament. Unless in Massachusetts every team is automatically in the tourney, the losing team must have won some games during the regular season.

These situations are, IMHO, a dilemma. It's not sportsmanlike ("sportspersonlike"?) to run up the score like that, but is it less insulting to tell the winning team to intentionally hang back and not play defense for awhile to make it look like a contest? What if even the winning team's third string is that much better than the other team's first string? It's a situation that shouldn't exist, but I do think the winning coach should at least have been giving his second and third string a lot more playing time.

[MechAg94]

I don't watch basketball much, but when you see a blowout in football, the winning team normally starts running the ball every play in the 2nd half and starts substituting backups liberally.  They might keep running the normal offense if the backups are in.  Sometimes they wait until the 4th quarter to do all that.  It depends on if the losing team is still scoring or not. 

In basketball, I would think momentum means a lot, but with only 7 points, I really doubt the losing team ever had any at all.

[zahc]

Serious question...does basketball have forfeit? It seems like the losing team should have forfeited at a certain point rather than basically not play. But I don't know if that sort of thing happens in basketball.

[HankB]

So what.

In 1940, the Chicago Bears beat the Washington Redskins in the NFL Championship Game (it wasn't the Super Bowl back then) by a score of 73-0.

And there have been plenty of blowouts in all sports - amateur and professional - since.

If you're talking about little kids - I mean pre-teens - a mercy rule may make sense - i.e., once one team pulls ahead by a certain margin, victory is declared and the game is over.

But by high school and college? Uh-uh. Get over it, snowflakes.

[Firethorn]

I don't watch basketball much, but when you see a blowout in football, the winning team normally starts running the ball every play in the 2nd half and starts substituting backups liberally.  They might keep running the normal offense if the backups are in.  Sometimes they wait until the 4th quarter to do all that.  It depends on if the losing team is still scoring or not. 

In basketball, I would think momentum means a lot, but with only 7 points, I really doubt the losing team ever had any at all.

If I remember right, This is partially to try to avoid injuries in your first stringers, as well as to help develop your 2nd and subsequent stringers more by giving them real experience.

I remember one Huskers game where it was so bad that the rumor was that they put the waterboy in as the QB.  The defense scored more than the opposing team did.

[MechAg94]

If I remember right, This is partially to try to avoid injuries in your first stringers, as well as to help develop your 2nd and subsequent stringers more by giving them real experience.

I remember one Huskers game where it was so bad that the rumor was that they put the waterboy in as the QB.  The defense scored more than the opposing team did.

Yeah, and I also realized this was high school.  You can see some pretty lopsided matchups in high school quite often in just about any sport.