THE BOWL ELIGIBLE BLOG
The Craziest Box Scores in College Football History
A 74-72 final in seven overtimes. A 6-4 game with no offensive touchdown. The craziest box scores in college football history, from a 64-game set.
A normal box score is a receipt. These are crime scenes. The games below come from the 64-game dataset behind our Box Score Autopsy game — 64 games from 1994 to 2024, chosen not because they were the biggest games of their years but because their numbers do not look real. Every score and stat below was pulled from that set and checked against it before this post was written.
The marathons
Texas A&M 74, LSU 72 (November 24, 2018). Seven overtimes, 146 combined points, the highest total in the dataset. Regulation ended 31–31, which means 84 of the 146 points were scored after the fourth quarter. This game is the reason the NCAA changed the overtime rules, moving teams to alternating two-point conversions earlier to keep games from running past midnight and into a fifth hour. When a single box score rewrites the rulebook, it has earned its place at the top of this list.
Illinois 20, Penn State 18 (October 23, 2021). Nine overtimes, the most in the dataset, and only 38 total points. The two games above could not be more different in shape: one was a shootout that refused to end, the other was two defenses taking turns saying no, deep into an overtime format that had been redesigned specifically to prevent a game like this from happening. It happened anyway, in the format's first season.
Arkansas 71, Kentucky 63 (November 1, 2003). Also seven overtimes. The detail that breaks your brain is in the dataset's own note: the teams scored 86 points across the overtime periods alone, after regulation produced 48. Western Michigan 71, Buffalo 68 in 2017 went seven overtimes too, for 139 combined points. There was apparently something in the water in the early overtime era, and Arkansas drank the most of it: the Razorbacks also own the 58–56 seven-overtime win over Ole Miss in 2001.
The rock fights
Iowa 6, Penn State 4 (October 23, 2004). Read the line score and it gets better: Penn State's four points came on two safeties, one in the first quarter and one in the fourth. Iowa won a Big Ten game with two field goals and no offensive touchdown, and Penn State scored the game's only points that involved tackling someone in the wrong end zone, twice, and lost anyway.
Auburn 3, Mississippi State 2 (September 13, 2008). A baseball score, and not even a good one. The only points in the game were an Auburn field goal and a Mississippi State safety. This is the lowest-scoring game in the dataset, and it happened between two SEC teams with functioning offenses, in September, in decent weather. Nobody has adequately explained it since.
Oregon State 3, Pittsburgh 0 (December 31, 2008). A bowl game, the Sun Bowl, decided by one field goal while the teams combined for 20 punts covering 879 yards. The punters outgained the offenses: the two teams managed 451 yards of offense between them. Wake Forest's 3–0 win over Boston College in 2015 belongs in the same wing — Wake punted 10 times for 513 yards, more than triple its own 142 yards of offense, and won.
Wake Forest 6, Virginia Tech 3 (November 22, 2014). It was 0–0 at the end of regulation. Not scoreless at the half. Scoreless after four quarters, in 2014, in the ACC. Wake finally won it in double overtime.
The shootouts where the stats stopped making sense
Oklahoma 66, Texas Tech 59 (October 22, 2016). The teams gained exactly 854 yards apiece, 1,708 combined, a symmetry no scriptwriter would dare submit. Patrick Mahomes threw for the bulk of Texas Tech's share and his team still lost, at home, scoring 59.
West Virginia 70, Baylor 63 (September 29, 2012). Geno Smith went 45 of 51 for 656 yards, 8 touchdowns, and no interceptions, and Baylor nearly matched him score for score. A quarterback can play a nearly perfect game and still need 70 points to survive the afternoon.
San Jose State 70, Rice 63 (October 2, 2004). One hundred thirty-three points and ten combined turnovers. Rice ran for 570 yards and lost. Hold those three facts in your head at the same time: 570 rushing yards, 63 points, defeat. Navy once scored 75 on SMU in 2016 while attempting 9 passes and never punting, and that game is only the fourth-weirdest entry in this section.
An honest note about the old ones
Seven games in the set predate 2004, and the record-keeping of that era is thin: six of the seven carry no team stats at all in the data, and the seventh, Auburn's 30–26 "Interception Game" win over LSU in 1994 — Auburn scored three fourth-quarter touchdowns on interception returns — has only a partial line. So when we tell you the 1997 Flea Kicker game ended Nebraska 45, Missouri 38, that score is solid and the famous deflected game-tying catch is documented, but the full statistical body of the game simply was not preserved the way a 2018 box score is. The craziness survived. The spreadsheets did not.
That is the spirit of Box Score Autopsy: we hand you the scoring summary and the stat line with the teams scrubbed, and you identify who played in the mess and what actually happened. The 6–4 game is in there. Everybody misses it the first time.