The University of Tennessee at Chattanooga men’s basketball team played its regular-season finale Saturday at McKenzie Arena, beating Virginia Military Institute 86-79 in a game that was of little consequence to the Southern Conference standings heading into the league tournament.
VMI, with one conference win, was already locked into last place and the lowest seed for the 10-team bracket, and the Mocs entered knowing they could finish no better than eighth, which they did. In a strong showing for UTC, junior guard Jordan Frison utilized his mid-range game for 33 points, his most since joining the Mocs as an offseason transfer, and senior guard Billy Smith rained in five 3-pointers on 11 attempts.
And yet there was something else significant about what fourth-year head coach Dan Earl’s Mocs (and even the Keydets) did on the court: They played the cleanest game in the history of NCAA Division I basketball, men or women.
With 40 minutes of regulation play complete, there were three total turnovers on the stat sheet. UTC committed two of them, both in the second half; VMI turned the ball over in the first 10 minutes — but not again.
That is the lowest turnover count for NCAA D-I basketball in recorded history. Since Sports Reference began reliable play-by-play data tracking in 2005, no game has ended with fewer turnovers.
BREAKING IT DOWN
There have been 247 games in which a D-I team has recorded two or fewer turnovers since 2005. The amount of games differ by season, but NCAA estimates indicate there have been close to 115,000 games played over the past two decades.
That equates to a 0.2% chance a team commits two or fewer turnovers. There were 33 such games this season, including one the Mocs played in against Samford in January.
VMI’s one-turnover performance against the Mocs is significantly rarer. Of the 247 recorded games, only 48 of them had a team with just one turnover, including four such games this season.
So games like this happen, but only for one side of the court. If a team is taking care of the ball at a historic rate, it often means the other team is giving the ball up.
In those 247 recorded games when a team had two or fewer turnovers, the opposing team committed 10.5 turnovers on average. In the six games since 2005 in which a team had zero turnovers, the opposing team committed approximately 12 a game.
UTC and VMI both with low-turnover performances in the same game creates a record that will likely be hard to surpass.
OTHER ANOMALIES
Games like this are even rarer in women’s basketball. Since 2003, there have been 49 games in which a D-I team committed two turnovers, and just 12 games when a team had one. There has never been a game in D-I women’s basketball when a team recorded zero turnovers. The record for lowest total combined turnovers in a game is eight, which occurred twice in the 2010s.
Games with so few turnovers for one team are often blowouts. Teams with two or fewer turnovers in Sports Reference’s dataset won their games two-thirds of the time, leading by 17-plus points on average by the time the buzzer sounded.
Against VMI, the Mocs broke the mold here as well. It was a tightly contested game in which a late surge in the second half by UTC pushed out a seven-point win.
Contact digital producer Sam Kohn at skohn@timesfreepress.com.