A look at this day in history, when Tennessee and Temple scored 17 points in basketball, and the Oakland Raiders left town. Blog written by Coley Harvey, a broadcaster, podcaster, reporter, writer and host.
www.coleyharvey.com
The day Temple scored 6, and the end of the ‘Black Hole’
Dec 15
Written By
Coley Harvey
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As you hopefully saw in today’s
6 Feet, 60 Seconds video, it was on this day (12/15) in 1973 when the Tennessee and Temple men’s basketball teams combined to score just 17 points … in their entire game.
Seven. Teen!
17!
How did this happen? Well, with the game barely eight minutes old, Temple’s first-year head coach, Don Casey (who later went on to coach in the NBA), requested two of his guards take the ball past mid-court, and stand a few feet apart. He then told them to dribble and pass amongst themselves, working down the entire game clock for as long as the Volunteers would let them.
For the next 11 and a half minutes, the two players were the only ones to touch the ball. The clock never sounded. No buzzer, no interruptions, no action.
Satisfied that it didn’t let Tennessee’s potent offense break out for more than what it had through the first eight minutes of the game, Temple went into halftime trailing, 7-5.
You read that right. A basketball game featured a 7-5 halftime score. This wasn’t the seventh-inning stretch of a baseball game, nor was it the end of the first quarter of a football game that just happened to have a safety happen in it.
Mind you, this was still a point in time when the shot clock didn’t exist in college basketball. It wouldn’t be until another 12 years after this extreme use of a stalling tactic (other teams also stalled at times in those days, but it would typically happen late in games, and wouldn’t last anywhere near as long as this) before the NCAA instituted a 45-second shot clock. Then, in 1993, it went to the 35-second shot clock.
In the NBA, 24-second shot clocks had been used starting in 1954.
Coming out of halftime of this particular game, Tennessee had the ball first, and the Volunteers wanted revenge for what occurred in much of the game’s first 20 minutes. So, for the first three minutes of the second half, Tennessee’s offense decided to stall, too.
After Temple ended up getting the ball back later in the half, the Owls held it another 14 minutes before finally getting back to an actual offensive attack across the game’s final two minutes. That late push wasn’t enough, as Tennessee ended up holding on for the 11-6 win.
Volunteers center Len Kosmalski led all scorers that night with a whopping five points.
Since 1938, no other game has been as low-scoring as this one was. In that same span, no other team has scored as few points as Temple did.
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“I asked Don Casey why he did it and he said, ‘Coach, we were trying to win the game,’” late Tennessee head coach Ray Mears wrote in his memoir,
Ray Mears’ Big Orange Memories. “I told him he’d never be back. I paid him good money to come down here and entertain the fans, not do that stuff.”
Earlier that season (which was just five games old by this point), Tennessee had flexed its offensive muscle, beating South Florida, 117-90, and scoring 96 in a 35-point win over DePaul. Temple went on to post scores of 81, 78 and 75 points in later games that season.
Immediately after the game ended, Tennessee’s school president asked players to hold an intrasquad scrimmage for the 11,700 fans who were in attendance, angry they paid money for that disastrous display. But the scrimmage didn’t really take place, as many fans had already hit the exits, unwilling to spend a minute longer in the arena.
In 2007, just before Temple made its first trip back to Knoxville, Tennessee, since that ugly night, the
Philadelphia Inquirer caught up with several of the key actors from the game.
Here are a few of the comments the Inquirer got from those involved:
“Had I been a fan, I would have wanted my money back. It was absolutely just disastrous to watch.”
—Tennessee backup center Doug Ashworth
“There were some boos during the game, but they got tired of doing that after a while. They just sat there and watched nothing going on.”
—Temple guard Rick Trudeau
“At the end of the game, at least 10 state troopers were behind our bench to protect us. When the game was over, their bench, they all stood up and looked at us in disgust. There was no handshake or anything like that.”
—Temple head coach Don Casey
“It did get exciting in the last two minutes.”
—Bud Ford, Tennessee athletics department historian, who was on the game’s stat crew
