Scoring in golf is dead simple but that fact is obscured by the unnecessarily complicated language that golf uses to talk about scoring. It’s not all bad though, golf’s language is actually pretty enjoyable and easy to learn. Plus, the way that golf thinks about scoring expresses something about the essence of the sport which is useful to understand. We’ll run through how the scoring works and then explain how to talk about golf scores.
In any golf competition, the player who gets the ball into the hole in fewer hits, wins. It’s that simple! Whether you’re talking about a single hole, an 18-hole round, or a tournament which is usually four rounds of 18 holes each, the player who can complete play using the fewest number of strokes is the winner. Things can get more complicated with various team formats, many of which I explained in my post about the Ryder Cup, but the concept is always the same — use the fewest swings possible.
By now you might be wondering why, if the scoring concepts are so simple, the words used to talk about the score is so complicated. When you watch golf on TV or get into a conversation with golfers, you hear a lot of strange words like “par,” “birdie,” “eagle,” and “bogie.” Huh? Here’s the deal. Three concepts will make all of those vocabulary words make sense.
Every golf hole and course are unique and of varying difficulty.
Golf is designed to work equally well as a competitive sport played against other golfers and a puzzle played individually.
No more than four players can play on a single hole simultaneously, so in any large competition, play is staggered across several hours. Despite this, both for the golfers and for fans, a way of expressing the standings at any moment is needed.
Golf’s solution is to express score in a relative way. Every hole on every course is given a number of strokes that the designers of the course think that an excellent golfer should be able to complete the hole in. That number is called par and is generally from three to five strokes. Instead of saying that a golfer used four hits to successfully complete a hole, her score is expressed relative to par. Here’s where the vocab words come in:
Par – Derived from the latin word meaning “equal,” par means that a golfer finished a hole in the number of strokes the course designers expected him to.
Birdie – A birdie is finishing a hole in one fewer stroke than expected.
Eagle – Once birdie was established as the term for one better than par, golf took off on the bird metaphors in that direction. An eagle is two shots better than par.
Albatross – An albatross, as you might have guessed, is three shots better than par. It’s very, very unusual.
Bogey – A bogey is the opposite of a birdie. A player who has shot a bogey has taken one more stroke than par to complete a hole. There are no separate words as players use more and more strokes to finish a hole, the way to express it is by adding a modifier before the word bogey. Two strokes worse than par is a double-bogey, three a triple-bogey, four a quadruple-bogey, and five a dear sports fan special. Just joking, I guess you’d call that a quintuple bogey…
The purpose of this is not to confuse beginners! Think back to our three principles of golf. Expressing scores relative to an ideal, almost platonic score that’s set for each hole and course is a remarkably effective way of making golf an exciting challenge even if played alone. Without needing to compare your score to a competitor’s, you can judge how well you’re doing. Shoot a birdie? Celebrate! Hit a double-bogey, cry a single tear and move on. If scores were simply expressed in an absolute way — five shots for a particular hole — there would be no way for a solitary golfer to know if she did well or poorly. As a bonus, by setting a par particular to each course, a golfer can move from course to course and still compare his play to previous rounds on other golf courses. Sure, the course he played today may have been more difficult than the one he played on a week ago, but if its par was set correctly, it was higher. Shooting par should be equally difficult on every course in the world.
The other element of genius to the relative approach to scoring is that it doesn’t matter where a golfer is on a course, you can always create a leaderboard by using their scores relative to par. Golfer A who has finished all 18 holes of a round and completed them in two shots more than par has a score of +2 or two over par. Golfer B who is halfway through the course and has used one fewer shot than expected so far has shot one under par or -1. Golfer C who just played the first hole and completed it in the expected number of strokes is currently at par or 0. You can line these golfers up easily to see who is winning at the moment.
Golfer B — -1
Golfer C — 0
Golfer A — +2
Golfers B and C are still playing and can improve their score or mess up and make it worse while Golfer A is done and can do nothing but wait and watch but by using relative scoring, we can rank them at any moment of the day to see who is winning.
Hopefully this all makes sense out of the madness, Ezra Fischer
Brutal end for Arsenal: Arsenal felt like they had clawed their way back into contention in their game against Monaco when they scored a goal in the 91st minute to bring the score from 2-0 to 2-1. Then, even later into stoppage time, they made a silly blunder on defense and gave that goal right back. Monaco won 3-1 which will make it virtually impossible for Arsenal to advance to the next round of the Champions League. Line: You work so hard to get that goal back and then you give it right back. Brutal.
Rivalry indeed: NBC Network features one “rivalry” game each week on Wednesday nights. These “rivalries” are often pretty arbitrary and somewhat imaginary. Last night’s game between the Pittsburgh Penguins and Washington Capitals, however, lived up to its billing. There were seven goals and 34 penalty minutes! The Penguins came out on top, 4-3. Line: That almost looked like a playoff game. I can’t wait for playoff hockey.
Fireworks for the Rockets: The Houston Rockets beat the Los Angeles Clippers 110-105 last night thanks to a big performance off the bench from Corey Brewer. He scored his 20 points while wearing (as did all the Rockets) jerseys celebrating the Chinese New Year. The Rockets, thanks to the fact that the most famous Chinese basketball player ever, Yao Ming, used to play for their team, have enjoyed enormous popularity in China and clearly want to continue in that lucrative vein. Plus, they look really cool. I bet they’ll sell a lot of those jerseys in the United States too. Line: I know it’s just a coincidence but there’s something nice about the most popular NBA team in China being called the Rockets since fireworks are a big part of the Chinese New Year celebration.
Sports are constructed universes that each have their own set of rules. One of the most attractive aspects about being a frequent visitor to a sports world is that it’s rules are so much clearer and more well defined than the rules of the real world. Each sport has a clear objective and every game that’s played has a winner and a loser. It’s no coincidence that virtually every sports arena has a large screen in it which shows the current score at all times. Unlike the other facets of most people’s lives — workplace dramas, romantic relationships, friendships, etc. — a sports fan always knows how their team is doing. Every game ends with a win or a loss. Every season ends with a championship or no championship. In a blurry, grey world, sports offers black and white contrasts. Fans, athletes, coaches, and general managers are free to pursue a single goal with an unwavering commitment rarely available or wise outside the realm of sports.
“You play to win the game.” If you were to watch ESPN 24 hours a day (not a real recommendation) you would probably hear this phrase at least four or five times a day. The phrase first assaulted the sports Zeitgeist in 2002 when New York Jets head coach Herm Edwards said it in a post-game press conference.
The appeal of Edward’s rant is, at first glance, obvious. It’s a strident statement of the foundational truth about sports that we described above. Sports is objective. There is a winner and a loser and the goal is to be the winner. The second level of enjoyment for many people is in how dismissive and obnoxious Edwards is being towards the media member who somehow suggested that winning was not the ultimate purpose of sports. Bullying media members is, at this point in the United States, basically its own sport, and Edwards (who now works for ESPN himself,) is a champion at disdain. Forget those first two levels though, it’s the third level that we’re interested in today. The third level of interpretation reveals that this quote is complex. The thing about “playing to win the game,” is that it isn’t really true. Or at least, it’s a more paradoxical truth than it seems at first glance.
Today we’ll look at some of the ways in which teams don’t always choose to win games at all costs in two sports: NBA basketball and European club soccer.
NBA Basketball
Not trying to win or even trying not to win is one of the biggest topics in basketball right now. It’s seen as a crisis by many. There are two main ways in which teams subvert the single-minded goal of winning each game. The first is a strategy commonly known as tanking, where teams try to increase their chances of getting a high draft pick in an upcoming draft by losing as many games as possible in the current season. In an article on mathematical elimination, I described tanking as “a scourge to the sports world roughly equal to the flu in the normal world or sarcoidosis on House.” Tanking is trying not to win. The other focus of attention in the NBA is teams not trying to win an individual game by choosing not to play a player who is theoretically healthy enough to play that game. Unlike tanking, this tactic is used more by teams that believe themselves to be in championship contention.
Tanking
More than any other team sport, basketball teams are only as good as their best player. If you start in 1980, and list out the NBA Championship winners by their best player, the names are almost all recognizable, even to non-sports fans: Magic Johnson, Larry Bird, Magic, Julius Irving (Dr. J), Bird, Magic, Bird, Magic, Magic, Isaiah Thomas 2X, Michael Jordan 3x, Hakeem Olajuwan 2x, Jordan 3x, Tim Duncan, Shaquille O’Neal and Kobe Bryant 3x, Duncan, the exception to the rule that is the 2004 Detroit Pistons, Duncan, Dwayne Wade, Duncan, Paul Pierce, Kobe 2x, Dirk Nowitzky, LeBron James 2x, Duncan. Only once in the past 35 years has a team without a super-star won the championship!
The clear lesson for teams is that if they don’t have a super-star, their chances of winning a championship are drastically reduced. By far the easiest way of getting a super-star on a team is to draft him, usually with one of the first picks of the NBAdraft. There’s some chance involved, but at the end of every season, the team with the worst record has the best chance of getting the first pick, the second worst team, the second best chance and so on. If a team is going to be in the bottom third of the league, there’s a clear incentive to be as bad as possible.
Teams pursue this strategy in a number of ways, most of which don’t involve actually instructing their players not to score. By far the most common form of tanking is for general managers to manipulate the chances of their team winning by trading its best players. The goal is to have a set of players and coaches that all try their hardest to win but simply don’t have enough experience or talent to do it. The current Picasso of tanking is General Manager Sam Hinkie of the Philadelphia 76ers. Hinkie, who was recently profiled brilliantly by ESPN writer Pablo S. Torre, is taking this strategy farther than anyone has ever taken it before. He’s drafted injured players so that they cannot possibly cause the team to win the year after they are drafted. He’s drafted players from Europe and the rest of the world who will not actually come to the United States to play for the 76ers for several years. One of his first moves when he got the job was to trade away the 76ers best player, Jrue Holiday, and just a week ago, he traded two of their best players away again, mostly for future picks.
It remains to be seen whether this strategy will work or whether it will be a complete disaster. It’s also unclear how much longer it will be possible. Tanking is odious enough to people in the sports world that the NBA is likely to make structural changes to how it decided its draft pick order to take away the incentive to tank.
Resting Players
Unlike tanking, where a team is eager to forgo winning games in one season for the potential of winning games in a future season, this tactic involves reducing a team’s chances of winning a game in order to increase the team’s chances of winning the championship that year. Increasingly, basketball coaches and executives are realizing that most players cannot play at peak effectiveness for an 82-game regular season and then a playoff run that could involve as many as 28 additional games. Smart teams that hope to make it deep into the playoffs have adjusted to this knowledge by managing the number of minutes their players play during the regular season in the hopes of keeping them fresh for the playoffs. Often that means reducing a player’s normal time on the court per game from 35 minutes (out of 48) to 30 minutes over the course of the season. Other times, that might mean sitting a player for the entire second half of a game that is evidently going to be a blow-out win or loss by half-time. Even more blatant is the tactic of choosing not to have a player on the bench and available to play for a particular game.
Teams that choose to rest a player who isn’t seriously injured often choose one of the many small hurts that player is suffering from and use it as an excuse. A team might say, “Oh, So-and-So is out tonight because of a knee injury. They should be fine for the next game.” Usually the media knows this is nothing more than an excuse, but the gesture is enough to maintain the appearance that the team is optimizing to win every game. Some coaches, led by the example of San Antonio Spurs coach Gregg Popovich, don’t even bother with the excuse. They simply list players as “DND – CD” which stands for “Did Not Dress – Coach’s Decision.” Popovich famously thumbed his nose at the practice of using half-true injury designations to excuse coaches’ decisions to rest players in 2012 when he listed Tim Duncan as “DND – Old” for a game.
Resting players is not as noxious of a strategy as tanking, probably because the teams that do it are more well-respected (because they win) and because the future gain is so much closer and more concrete than the gains that teams tank for. The largest criticism of resting players is itself problematic. People often criticize resting players because the one game Tim Duncan sits out may be the only time a fan sees his team play in person all season or ever. By choosing to sit a player, a team is intentionally lowering the entertainment value of the game for its fans without a commensurate lowering of the cost. That argument make sense but only if sports is primarily entertainment rather than competition — and if it’s entertainment, then that in and of itself threatens the principle of trying to win every game. Uh oh, logical black hole alert! Let’s move on to soccer.
European Club Soccer
The structure of European club soccer creates a few scenarios where not winning is enough of a draw that even the most obsessed coaches are tempted to instruct their teams NOT to play to win the game. This subversion of what seems to be an obvious truth about sports is one of the curious and interesting things about learning how another continent organizes its sports leagues. Here are three common times when soccer clubs in Europe may be intent on something else more than on winning.
Balancing priorities
In American sports, there’s only one primary goal: win a championship. In European soccer, club teams compete for several different championships during a year, often simultaneously. A team may be playing in one or more domestic tournaments against teams within their country, an international club tournament like the Champions League or Europa League, at the same time as playing their normal league schedule against teams in their own country in their own league. This sometimes leads to conflicts of interest. If a player has a slightly injured ankle, will the coach choose to play him in a league game on Saturday knowing that there’s a Champions League game on Wednesday? What if the coach senses that the whole team is weary? Would it be better to lose in a domestic cup early on to clear the calendar for more rest days and practices? Will the benefit of rest and practice mean the difference between fifth and third place in the domestic league? Is that worth it? Which competition does the team have a better chance of winning? Which competitions are more lucrative and prestigious to do well in?
In American sports, coaches and teams don’t need to balance priorities like this, but in European club soccer, it’s a regular part of life. I wonder what a European soccer fan would think of Herm Edwards’ saying “you play to win the game?” Would they think it was funny because it’s true, funny because it’s not true, or just inaccurate and confusing?
The logic of aggregate goals
Many of the competitions that European soccer clubs take part in are tournaments. These tournaments often have a group round-robin stage and a knock-out stage, just like the World Cup. Unlike the World Cup and most other tournaments we’re used to, instead of one game against each opponent, European soccer clubs play two — one at each team’s home stadium. The team that has scored the most goals at the end of the two games (called aggregate goals) wins the matchup. The rules about breaking ties vary from tournament to tournament but they often have something to do with which team scored more goals when they were playing in their opponent’s stadium. The result of this is that teams pretty frequently go into games with goals other than simply winning. An underdog playing on the road in the first half of the two game series (often confusingly called a “tie”) may think that their best bet is to play defensively and try to leave with a 0-0 tie. A team that goes into the second game down a goal or two knows they need to not only win but to win by two or three or four goals. Likewise, a team going into a second game with the lead in aggregate goals knows they can lose the second game and still win the two-game series. They are not playing to win the game, they’re playing to win or tie or lose by a small enough margin to still win the series. Put that in your remix and smoke it!
When a tie is better than a win
Even in the most twisted of aggregate goal logic, it’s still always better to win than tie or lose but there is one situation when a tie is preferable than a win. Some tournaments, England’s FA cup being the most famous example, are set up as single elimination tournaments but, instead of overtime, if the score is tied after 90 minutes, the teams pack their bags, go home, and schedule a second game to decide who advances and who is eliminated. The second game is played in the stadium of the team that didn’t host the first game. Since the FA Cup is an association cup, open to every team in English soccer, from the rich, famous Premier league teams all the way to tiny seventh tier virtually semi-professional teams that no one has heard of, this leads to an interesting point. When a tiny team plays in a giant’s stadium, they get an enormous financial benefit from exposure, television money, and ticket sales. The bigger and more famous their host opponent, the more money they make. So, it’s often financially better for a tiny host team to tie a giant visiting team so that they get an extra game to play against the giant in the giant’s home stadium. Oh, sure, they’d love to beat the giant and move on to the next round of the tournament, but if they did that without ever playing at the giant’s stadium, especially if their potential opponent next round is not as rich or famous, they’ll really be losing out on an enormous payday. Small teams in this type of tournament have an incentive to tie, not win, games they host against storied opponents.
Understanding how scoring works is one on the fundamental elements of beginning to understand a sport. I’ve written in the past about how scoring works in football and bowling and I will certainly get to other sports in the near future.
For today, I’ve created a simple chart that you can use as a reference as you watch different sports and wonder what types of scores are or aren’t possible.
A few things that may jump out at you as you read the chart.
Football has by far the most varied and complex set of scoring options. It’s also the only sport where a team cannot score a single point. The one point extra point is only possible in conjunction with a six point touchdown.
Hockey and soccer, the two lowest scoring sports, are also the only two where scoring more than a single goal at one time is impossible.
While the mechanism for scoring a point in baseball is solitary (a player runs around the bases and touches home plate without being caught out by the defensive team, it is possible to score one, two, three, or four runs at one time.
Football and basketball both use the term “field goal” but in football it refers to kicking the ball through the uprights while in basketball it’s simply the official phrase for tossing the ball through the basket. It’s possible for both field goals to be worth three points to the team making them but in basketball a two point field goal is also ordinary.
In basketball, a field goal plus a free throw is popularly called an “and one.”
Let me know if this is useful and what other sports you’d like to see added to the chart!
Home teams win the first leg 2-1: That was the result of both the Champions League games yesterday. Barcelona beat Manchester City 2-1 and Juventus beat Borussia Dortmund by the same score. What that means is that in the second half of the two game series, all Manchester City and Borussia Dortmund have to do to advance is win 1-0. That way the series will be even at 2 goals apiece but Manchester City and Borussia Dortmund would have scored one goal away from their home arena and their opposition would not have. Line: Losing 2-1 away from home in the first of a two game series is not the worst thing in the world.
The Blues have the blues: The St. Louis Blues lost their game against the Montreal Canadiens last night by an uncomfortably wide margin, 5-2. They’ve only won four of their last nine games and are starting to slide down in the standings. The Canadiens, on the other hand, are now in first place in the Eastern Conference. Line: There’s still time to turn it around but I wonder if the Blues peaked too early this year.
Wizards in trouble: Where are the elves? Where are the hobbits? The Wizards are in dire need of some help after dropping their sixth game in the last eight to the Golden State Warriors last night. The score was 114-107, which just goes to show that you shouldn’t try to outscore the Warriors. Of course, the Warriors are so good at offense, it’s hard to force them into a slower-paced, lower scoring game that you might have a chance to win. Line: Time for the Wizards to fire their coach?
It’s almost March: And we all know what that means… it’s time for the Wisconsin men’s basketball team to start disappointing their fans! Last night they came out very slow in their game against Maryland and were down by 11 points at halftime. The Wisconsin Badgers chewed their way back into the game in the second half but were only able to outscore Maryland by five points in the second half — not enough to catch up — and they ended up losing 59-53. Line: Remind me not to pick Wisconsin to go far in my March Madness bracket this year.
In 2015 Dear Sports Fan will be previewing the biggest sporting event of the year in each of the 50 states in the United States plus the district of Columbia. Follow along with us on our interactive 2015 US Map.
Rhode Island — U.S. Figure Skating Synchronized Skating Championships
Synchronized Skating — February 25-28, 2015
Rhode Island is the smallest state in the country and one of the strangest. It has a long tradition of being on the cutting edge of sporting events. It hosted the country’s first outdoor polo match in 1876, the first open golf tournament in 1895, and the first national lawn tennis championship in 1899. The state is well-known for its hosting of folk and jazz music festivals in Newport. Even the circus first came to Rhode Island in 1774! This year, the biggest sporting event of the year is the U.S. Figure Skating Synchronized Skating Championships.
Synchronized skating is admittedly, not a very well-known sport, but it has a lot going for it. Synchronized skating is seriously athletic! Like synchronized swimming, which is an Olympic sport, synchronized skating features individual athletes performing feats that most people couldn’t dream of doing alone, much less in completely regimented, virtually flawless lock-step with a team full of athletes performing the same tricks.
The championships will not, as far as I can tell, be televised or available in a streaming fashion, so you’ll have to head over to the Dunkin’ Donuts center in Providence, Rhode Island, to see them in person. The schedule is available here and generally follows a young to old pattern, with the younger teams starting on Wednesday and doing most of their routines before the tournament transitions to its most serious divisions Friday night into Saturday.
How does synchronized skating work?
Synchronized skating is a team sport where groups of ice skaters perform coordinated dance-like routines to music. Synchronized skating is a judged sport, just like the individual or pairs figure skating you might be used to watching in the Winter Olympics. Teams consist of between 12 and 20 people depending on the level of competition (from Tot to Youth to Collegiate to Senior.) One of the coolest things about the sport is that, although most of the participants are female, there are no sex or gender requirements whatsoever. It’s a totally egalitarian sport. In competitions, each team will perform two routines, a short program and a free skating routine. Like in Olympic skating, the short program is all about performing difficult technical elements while the free skate’s length allows for more artistic expression. Each routine is scored before the competition based on how difficult it is. During a competition, the judges will be looking to see how well a team executes the planned routine. A more difficult routine therefore has a higher potential score than an easier routine. A lot of a sport’s strategy must be about finding the exact right balance between too easy and too risky.
Each routine must have a set of required elements, although there is room for variation and creativity within the rules. The Wikipedia page on the sport has a list of these elements and nice descriptions of each. Many of them, like the Wheel, Block, Circle, Intersection, and Line requirements are descriptive of the overall shape of the team. If seen from above (or imagined) the entire team must do something in the shape of a wheel, block with three parallel lines, etc. Other requirements are about what skaters do within formations. For example, in a Spin move, each skater must spin the same number of rotations at the same speed as his or her teammates. To fulfill a Pair requirement the team must do something where pairs of skaters hold onto each other. The lifting of one skater by another, like in pairs figure skating, is allowed, and, since there are so many more skaters on the ice, synchronized skating teams sometimes do group lifts, like you might see from cheerleaders.
In an article about a local team going to the national championships, The Frederick News Post quotes the mother of a skater as saying that watching the team is like “watching a flock of birds.” That’s a very apt description. It’s hard to do the sport justice by describing it, you’ve really got to see it. Luckily, there’s Youtube! What you’re about to see is a routine by the most successful American Sychronized Skating program, the Haydenettes from Lexington, Massachussets. Their team has won the U.S. Championships every year but two since 1999! The performance is impressive for some of the same reasons that a fighter-plane flyover before a football game is — power, speed, and precision. I am guessing that the team’s name is an homage to another impressively synchronized team, the Rockettes. The difference with the Haydenettes, and the thing that makes this sport so cool, is that they’re on ice. The positive of being on ice is that it allows for speed, power, and fluidity that would be hard to achieve on solid ground. The downside, of course, is that any mistake is magnified. Get an inch off, and the ice will make that inch into a foot. Also, and it’s hard to emphasize this enough, being on ice means you are wearing deadly weapons on your feet while you move backwards at high speeds mere inches from a teammate who is herself moving backwards at the same speed. Talk about trust!
Who’s going to win?
Like most competitions that involve the creation of beauty — ballet, beauty pageants, cheer leading — my assumption is that beneath the surface, synchronized skating is every bit as competitive as football or ice hockey. With that in mind, there’s no way I’m betting against the reigning champion Haydenettes who will be competing not far from their home town. The two teams that could challenge them are the Miami University team and the Crystallettes from Dearborn Michigan.
Ducks win the battle of the birds: If you look in the newspaper today (or more likely the internet) you’ll see that the Anaheim Ducks beat the Detroit Red Wings 4-3 last night. If you look more closely, you’ll see that the game went to a shootout and in the shootout the Ducks scored two goals while the Red Wings scored only one. When two teams are tied going into a shootout, the team with more goals in the shootout gets one goal added to their total for the game. It’s not particularly accurate but it’s the easiest way to quickly show who won. Line: There were only two games on the NHL schedule last night. Luckily one of them was good!
NBA TV chose two close games to show: Last night NBA TV had a relatively rare double-header of games. I noted in my sports forecast that because NBA TV is a smaller brand than TNT or ESPN, the channels that usually televise NBA games nationally, they seem to be free to pick teams from smaller or less traditional markets. Lucky for them, both games they chose last night were decided by three points. The New Orleans Pelicans beat the Toronto Raptors 100-97 and the Memphis Grizzlies beat the Los Angeles Clippers 90-87. Line: Pelicans, Grizzlies, Clippers, Raptors — who the heck names these teams??!
Rankings hold true in Women’s College Basketball: There were two big-time matchups of top ten teams last night in women’s college basketball. In both games, the team with the better ranking beat the team with the worse ranking. Fourth ranked Notre Dame had little trouble with eighth ranked Louisville, beating them by 16 points. The game between second ranged South Carolina and sixth ranked Tennessee was a little closer — 71-66 — but the team that was expected to win, still won. Line: Upsets are more rare in the women’s game but neither of these matchups really had much of an underdog.
Kansas State surprises Kansas: I was going to write “shocks” but settled for “surprises” because in an in-state rivalry like the one Kansas has with Kansas State, it’s not actually incredibly unexpected for the underdog to win. Rivalry games often seem like they are governed by a different set of rules than other games. Emotion plays a bigger role vis-a-vis skill than in in non-rivalry games and sometimes that’s enough to upset the normal order of things. After Kansas State beat Kansas 70-63, the crowd stormed the court and there were some altercations between Kansas State fans and Kansas players and coaches. Line: I love watching underdogs win and seeing a few thousand happy students run onto the court is special, but I wish there was a way to get the visiting team off the floor before it happened.
