Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - The Biggest Sports Blowouts of All Time

Episode Date: July 22, 2020

In the world of sports, most people enjoy very close fought, exciting games that go down to the wire. If you were to take a poll on what the best games or matches in history were in any given sport, it would probably involve a close score with a last-second victory to put one team over the edge. However, there are times when a team gets whooped so bad, you just have to sit back and admire the shellacking they received. This is the realm of the blowout. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In the world of sports, most people enjoy very close-fought, exciting games that go down to the wire. If you were to take a poll on what the best games or matches in history were in any given sport, it would probably involve a close score with a last second victory to put one team over the edge. However, there are times when a team gets whooped so bad, you just have to sit back and admire the shalakiing they received. This is the realm of the blowout. Learn more about some of the most lopsided victories and losses in the history of sports. of everything everywhere daily.

What if your perceptions about the past were wrong? ThruLine is a podcast that takes you back in time to uncover the parts of the story that may have gone unnoticed. It effectively turned day into night. And how it shaped the world now. Time travel with us every week on the ThruLine podcast from NPR. This episode is sponsored by G Adventures. These are very troubled times.

Even though things are starting to get better and more countries are opening up, people are still hesitant to travel, and that is totally understandable. That is why Gadventures has announced its new Travel with Confidence Plus collection. The Travel with Confidence Plus collection are 37 tours in 27 countries that have increased safety and sanitation protocols to protect you and other travelers. These tours will have smaller group sizes, private transportation, and cheaper options to get your own room, as well as more personal space. G-Adventures has also earned the World Travel and Tourism Council's Safe Travel Stap for their health and hygiene protocols and has implemented the Adventure Travel Trade Association's COVID-19 Health and Safety Guidelines. The Travel with Confidence tours are available for booking today and we'll be departing from October 2, 2020 to the end of 2021. For more information and to book your tour, click on the link in the show notes.

The games I'm going to be talking about today aren't just lopsided. Lopsided scores happen every so often and probably, even every week to some extent in organized leagues. I'm going to be talking about legendary losses that are so astonishing, it's hard to even figure out how it was physically possible. After all, even an incompetently bad team can often lay down enough to serve as a speed bump to prevent someone from scoring. The legendary losses often have a story behind it.

Perhaps the best-known blowout in history occurred in 1916 when Georgia Tech in Atlanta defeated Cumberland College of Tennessee in a football game by the score of 222 to nothing. To put this defeat in perspective, there have only been 11 games since the end of World War II in any collegiate division where a team has scored 100 points in a game. So what happened in the Georgia Tech versus Cumberland game? To understand the game, you first have to go back to a baseball game played between the two teams earlier in the year, where Cumberland beat Georgia Tech by a score of 22 to nothing. Cumberland had used semi-professional baseball players as ringers.

The Georgia Tech baseball coach was really upset over what Cumberland did and didn't forget it. Cumberland had disbanded their football team prior to the start of the 1916 season and cancelled all of their games. However, they had a contract with Georgia Tech, which stipulated that they would owe Georgia Tech $3,000 if they didn't show up to play, an amount worth about $71,000 today. In fact, the Georgia Tech football coach offered Cumberland, $500 to play if they did show up and would cover the cost of expenses for the school. It's here I should point out that Georgia Tech's football coach was also their baseball coach, who lost to Cumberland earlier in the year, and that his name was John Heisman.

If that name rings a bell, it's because John Heisman is the same Heisman that the award is named after for the best college football player in the country. Cumberland, not wanting to lose money, assembled a team of 16 players, mostly from the same for to go and play. Some of them had never even seen a football game before and didn't know the rules. Heisman had a plan. He was going to go full throttle for the entire game and jack up the score as high as possible, which was the entire purpose of paying Cumberland to travel to Atlanta. His reason for doing this was twofold. One, he wanted revenge for what Cumberland's baseball team did to him earlier in the year. And two, he wanted to prove a point to the sports writers who tended to rank football teams based on

how many points they scored and the margin of victory, not the strength of schedule. Cumberland had negative 28 yards of offense for the game with 15 turnovers. Georgia Tech scored 32 touchdowns, had 522 yards rushing, and didn't even attempt a single pass. Twelve of the touchdowns they scored were by defense or special teams. There wasn't a first down in the entire game. Cumberland didn't get any because they were bad, and Georgia Tech. didn't get any because they scored touchdowns on every single possession.

It was so bad that a few Cumberland players ran off the field and hid. Back in 1916, the rules allowed for the team scored against to select whether they wanted to kick or receive, and several times Cumberland elected to kick. They even punted on third down several times just to surprise Georgia Tech. There was only one play in the entire game where Cumberland managed to stop Georgia Tech from scoring, and that was the last play of the game. which was an extra point attempt. Cumberland used a pyramid defense where the players would stack up on top of each other

and one player would jump on their backs to block a kick. The formation is illegal today, but it was allowed back in 1916. It worked. However, the blocker, a Cumberland player by the name of Vitchie Woods, suffered a horrible injury when he blocked the kick with his face. The biggest blowout in the history of the NFL happened, believe it or not, in the NFL championship game. In the 1940 NFL championship,

the Chicago Bears defeated the Washington Redskins 73 to nothing. Here, too, the motivation was revenge. Bears coach George Hallis showed his team a newspaper clipping where the Redskins coach called them crybabies and quitters. In International Association football, aka soccer, Vanuatu defeated Micronesia 46 to nothing in the 2015 Pacific Games.

In this case, Micronesia was just really bad. In club football, the most lopsided score occurred in Madagascar, where ASADEMIA beat S.O. Lamarne 149 to nothing in 2002. The game occurred in the last game of the Madagascar Championship. The champion was determined by a round-robin of the top four teams. In the game leading up to this, a very questionable call at the end of the previous match resulted in a draw for S.O. Le Mairn, which meant that the final match, was meaningless as they couldn't win regardless of the outcome.

So Le Mern protested the officiating in the final meaningless game by scoring own goal after own goal for the entire game. A.S. Ademia won without ever touching the ball or scoring a goal. Perhaps the biggest surprise blow at I found was an Olympic qualifying match in 2008 in women's hockey between Slovakia and Bulgaria. Slovakia won 82 to nothing. I actually watched some of the video. the game, and there didn't seem to be any special circumstance surrounding it. Bulgaria was just

really bad. It seemed like they barely knew how to skate. Slovakia scored a goal, on average, every 43 seconds. My favorite blow in high school basketball happened in a 1990 girls game when Morningside High School of Inglewood, California, beat South Torrance High School of Torrance, California, 102 to 24. The game is noteworthy because basketball great Lisa Leslie scored 101 points, just shy of the 105 points single game record set by Hall of Famer Cheryl Miller. 102 to 24 is a blowout, but it isn't necessarily legendary. What makes this score legendary is that it happened in one half. South Torrance didn't even show up for the second half of the game. So Lisa Leslie scored the second highest total points in a single game in

just the first half. But that wasn't the biggest blowout in high school basketball. That happened in 2009 when the girls' team from Covenant School of Dallas defeated Dallas Academy 100 to nothing. Dallas Academy is a school for kids with learning disabilities, and they field a team of eight players out of a student population of 20 girls. They hadn't won a game in four years prior to this one. The blowout made national news, and the coach of the winning team was fired two weeks later. Despite the lopsided matchup, despite being fired, and despite being lambasted in the national media, Covenants coach Micah Grimes has never once apologized. Executive producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is James Mackle.

Special thanks to everyone who supports the show over on Patreon. Please remember to leave a review over on Apple Podcasts. Even a simple review can really help the show get discovered in the third. sea of other podcasts that are out there.