College Basketball Talk staff reactions to Jack Taylor’s 138-point night

In the day after Grinnell College’s Jack Taylor set the record for most points in a college game with 138 there have been no shortage of opinions on the matter. Some were appalled while others don’t see the need for folks to be so upset. So how did the College Basketball Talk crew see Taylor’s night? Those responses are below.

Rob Dauster
It’s a D3 game against a crap team. They wanted to see how many points that could get one kid to score. Anyone that takes this nore seriously than that needs to go home, drink a beer, take a shot, and realize that life ain’t that serious.

David Harten
I’m one of those people that sees it two ways.

1.) What Grinnell plays in general is not “basketball” to me, they simply “score points”. When you do what they do, stuff like this happens. So I view Taylor’s accomplishment as more of a gimmick than a feat.

2.) It’s Division III basketball. These kids play simply because they love it and get no financial assistance based on their athletic talents. Teams like Grinnell play like this to get publicity and because it’s fun. And when you have the athletic budgets the size of some large high schools in Texas, you do what you can to get noticed.

So while I don’t see it as an overly-impressive achievement, I do see it as an accomplishment worth noticing.

Troy Machir
I’m from the  Herm Edwards school of thought: “HELLO. You play to win the game.”

During a 2007 Mid-Atlantic Conference playoff lacrosse game against top-seeded Widener College, my Elizabethtown Blue Jays took a surprising one-goal lead early in the first quarter, and decided to kill as much time off the clock as humanly possible. Widener played a packed-in zone with no pressure on the ball-handler, which allowed up to kill as much time off the clock as we wanted when we got the ball into the offensive half of the field. It took Widener 3 quarters to figure out how to force us to move the ball.  Widener came in to the game averaging roughly 14gpg. They beat us in OT 3-2.

Should we show Jack Taylor’s game footage to youth basketball coaches around the country? Of course not. But to laud this as “selfish” and “bad for basketball” is just foolish. You play to win the game. If the kid can shoot, get him the ball. If the other team can’t stop him, keep shooting.

This is D-III sports. Sure, there was probably a bit of frustration from some of the players who may have had some open look. But if you’re on a team with a dude who is approaching triple-digits, you enjoy the ride.

It’s certainly not the most ideal, foolproof formula for success, but hey, On Tuesday November 21st, it worked.

Terrence Payne
Of course this is an incredible and ridiculous number to put up in a game. At the same there are going to be purists that hate this, but can you imagine being a student at small Grinnell College watching this happen? It must have been nuts for the 36 minutes he was out there.

Fact of the matter is this is D3 ball. The Faith Baptist Bible college coach already came out and said he is not offended. Jack Taylor put up a remarkable, potentially unbeatable number. It’s a fun story for basketball that doesn’t really matter to anyone but those who play in it. Give him his 15 minutes and wake me up when Grinnell is in the D3 title game.

Raphielle Johnson
Personally I have no problem with Jack Taylor’s 138 points last night. If the announcer’s comments at the start of the webcast weren’t enough for people to realize what was going on, watching the same guy shoot over and over should have made it clear the pursuit of a record was the goal of the contest. They didn’t tell Faith Baptist to not double- or triple-team (they did this at times, but clearly not enough) Taylor; their defensive issues aren’t the fault of either Taylor or Grinnell. Frankly we watch examples of “bad” basketball every day, but which would you rather watch: a guy scoring 138 points or a display like last week’s Fresno State/UC Riverside game (halftime score: 13-11)? And personally I don’t see the harm in Taylor’s performance, especially if his teammates went along with it.

Grinnell, using the style of play they’ve played for years, decided to have a player make a run at Bevo Francis’ record and got it. The head coach at Faith Baptist didn’t sound offended, and if he was something “more” probably would have been done during the game to prevent Taylor from going off. Jack Taylor had a great night and I salute him for it.

Daniel Martin

Part of the beauty of college basketball is the fact that there are so many different schools of thought and styles of play.

Just because Grinnell plays such a radically different system, it sets off a wave of outrage? This is the way the school traditionally plays. It’s a Division III basketball team playing with non-scholarship players who are having fun.

They’re an anomaly. If you were a Division III caliber player, why wouldn’t you go play for a program that gives you the opportunity to try something so drastically different?

I understand the contrarians. There are so many similar stories praising Mr. Taylor’s achievement that there is a market for tearing it down.

But why this over-the-top negative reaction? Do we have a legitimate fear that Tom Izzo and Roy Williams are finding a way to implement this system in Division I? C’mon.

Let Mr. Taylor enjoy his 15 minutes.

Eric Angevine

Essentially, in athletics, people do what they can do, and it’s up to the opponent to stop them. Sportsmanship is a nice concept, but so is playing your best and not holding back. As Daniel pointed out, people whined about dunking (including my favorite coach of all time John Wooden), but once that genie was out of the bottle, it wasn’t going back in. Guys can dunk, now someone has to figure out how to stop them.

In college football, teams that run up the score are LOVED. And let’s all act like we would have paid one iota of attention to some news out of Grinnell if it were about how many Rhodes Scholars they cranked out or that they played a game where somebody scored one point below the previous record.

So there are the thoughts of the CBT staff on Jack Taylor’s night. We’ll leave you with a very good point that Eric made on all of this:

We’ve heard in the past week that our conferences are going to be broken up even further, the NCAA is strong-arming former college kids in Miami, and we’re more upset about a kid essentially doing what basketball players are trained to do – score.