Oxy Basketball Keeps Caltech Streak Alive
Ξ January 17th, 2008 | → | ∇ 90041 |
Last night, the guys from Yorkblvd.com decided to satisfy our sports fix by heading over to Occidental College to check out the 21st ranked…in division 3…Men’s Basketball program. The only problem was that as they lost to Claremont McKenna over the weekend, they’ve been bounced from the top 25. Despite this demotion to the “Also Receiving Votes” category of the rankings, we were relatively confident that our Tigers would trounce the visiting Caltech Beavers.
For those of you unfamiliar with anything beyond the earthquake readings that come from the California Institute of Technology, Caltech is the place of ‘80s comedies. (Real Genius, starring Val Kilmer, was based on Caltech though it was filmed at Oxy.) The male to female student ratio is about 2.5/1, they boast 31 Nobel Prize winning alumni, and are consistently ranked above the venerated MIT. As you may have guessed, their athletics take a considerable backseat (locked in the trunk is more like it) to their academics. In fact, while I was at Oxy, the rumors were that Caltech students were required to play a sport for “stress alleviation”. I’m not sure if that’s true, but I do know we only won about 6 league games per year and three of them were against the Beavers.
Caltech’s basketball program has even become a minor cause célèbre with a documentary on the team’s struggles having been screened at a few national film festivals. The film’s tagline? “Quantum Hoops: Before they can change the world, they need to win one game.” Apparently this dream had come true as Caltech won their first game since 2004 against Bard earlier this year. To put that win into perspective, the Bard victory was their first win over an NCAA Division III opponent since the ’95-‘96 season. Not to worry though, Caltech was still working to keep their 245 game conference losing streak alive against Oxy. Would the unfamiliar taste of victory in the Beavers’ mouths lead Oxy to fall into a classic “trap game”? Well at halftime it appeared so. Oxy led 41-35, but only six minutes earlier, the game had been tied at 31. Unfortunately, the Beavers wouldn’t score for the first five and a half minutes of the second half and would eventually lose 92-49.
Still, denied a historic upset, I took away a few positives here. First, although I was hoping for a Revenge of the Nerds gameplan (Booger plotting trajectories with a slide rule and using quantam mechanics to hit three pointers) there is something surreal about watching a team of guys who haven’t played organized basketball since thier YMCA rec league compete in college basketball. Second, there aren’t many levels above high school where you can sit courtside at a basketball game for free. Finally, small college athletics is one of the last vestiges of an actual student-athlete. These kids hit the showers and then hit the books hard. There’s something refreshing about watching successful athletes who aren’t being accused of sexual assault, taking money from boosters, or taking advantage of institutionalized cheating simply because they can jump through the roof. The two games I’m looking forward to on Oxy’s remaining schedule are their February 6 rematch against Claremont McKenna, the team that knocked Oxy out of the rankings, and their February 20th game against California Lutheran University, who is also on the fringe of the top 25. See you there.
