An Instant Reaction to Grinnell's Jack Taylor

I was going to hold off on another blog until my conference previews.

But that was until Grinnell's Jack Taylor blew up for a college basketball record 138 points against Faith Baptist Bible College on Tuesday night and subsequently blew up my phone from my friends that I played in college with while I was typing a high school basketball gamer.

So I feel compelled, like it seems the rest of America seems to on Twitter and Facebook, to give my reaction to Taylor's spectacular night.

I'm going start out by saying that people should still be in awe of the accomplishment. Scoring 138 points isn't easy. Heck, I probably couldn't go into an empty gym right now and score 138 points in 36 minutes against nothing but the air around me.

That being said, there needs to be some context to this record.

Firstly, Taylor's record is more about the system that he plays in than his actual skills. Grinnell plays a system where their is extensive trapping in the backcourt on defense and if it gets broken, they concede the layup to the opposing team. 

On offense they chuck up the first opportunity from 3-point land that they have and are often not on offense longer than 15 seconds, or even 10 seconds for that matter.

Now, I have not seen this personally, but this information comes from first hand accounts from coaches and ex-players who have seen it in action. 

This allows Grinnell to score a high volume of points, while giving up a lot of points (they gave up 104 to Faith Baptist on Tuesday) on every night.

Taylor was the recipient of that system tonight.

Secondly, this record comes nearly to the day that Taylor's teammate, Griffin Lentsch, broke the DIII college record against Principia. He had 89 points that night. So lets compare box scores.

Lentsch (last year against Principia)  27-55 FGs, 15-33 3pt FGs, 20-22 FTs, 89 pts.

Taylor (this year against Faith Baptist) 52-108 FGs, 27-71 3pt FGs, 7-10 FTs, 138pts.

Taylor's output is basically double of Lentsch's in field goals and 3-pointers and about 50 percent more in points.

In both, however, only two other players combined for 20 points. For Lentsch, two players hit double figures with ten while for Taylor, one player had 13 points (Aaron Levin) and one had seven points (Ironically, Lentsch). 

Also interesting is the neither garnered a single assist for the night and each played for 36 minutes, while no other teammate played for 20+ minutes and only a few played for just over 15 minutes, as per the normal subbing patterns for Grinnell.

So, what do these box score's tell us? They tell us that Grinnell was purposefully feeding these players to grab the records and they've now done it two years in a row.

Thirdly, let's look at the competition that these record-breaking feats happened against.

During Lentsch's scoring barrage last year, Grinnell was playing against Principia, who finished 0-25 and didn't win a game in the St. Louis Intercollegiate Athletic Conference, statistically one of the weaker conferences in the nation.

Taylor and the Pioneers faced Faith Baptist, a team that doesn't play in the NCAA, but the National Christian College Athletic Association, traditionally made up of smaller private Christian colleges.

This team also lost 12 of the 15 players from their varsity squad this year.

So both of these feats happened against inferior talent, coupled with the whole team feeding them the ball in a system that is notorious for putting up ridiculous numbers of points. Think about that when you look at the record.

I'm not saying it's wrong. But I'm not saying it's right, either.