THE BOWL ELIGIBLE BLOG
Sickos Committee Classics: The Lowest-Scoring Games in Our Vault
Two 3-0 finals, a 3-2 baseball score, and a 6-4 game built on safeties: the lowest-scoring games among the 64 in our Box Score Autopsy vault.
Every game in our Box Score Autopsy vault was curated for being strange, which is why the honesty note matters more here than anywhere: the vault holds 64 games, hand-picked for deranged stat lines between 1994 and 2024. It is not a census of every game played since 2000, and this is not a ranking of the lowest-scoring games in college football history. It is the bottom of our own beautiful pile. Ranked by combined points, here is what the bottom of a weirdness collection looks like.
3 points: Oregon State 3, Pittsburgh 0 (2008 Sun Bowl)
A bowl game, on New Year's Eve, in front of 49,037 people, produced one field goal. The two teams combined for 20 punts and 879 punting yards, six turnovers (three apiece), and 451 total yards of offense between them. Pittsburgh running back LeSean McCoy led all rushers with 85 yards and it changed nothing. Oregon State quarterback Lyle Moevao threw for 193 yards without a touchdown. Three points, total, and the trophy presentation still happened, presumably at regulation speed.
3 points: Wake Forest 3, Boston College 0 (2015)
Wake Forest won a game in which it gained 142 total yards and picked up 5 first downs. Read that again. Boston College outgained the Demon Deacons 270 to 142 and lost, because football is not a yardage contest, it is a suffering contest. Wake's punt team was its offense: the Demon Deacons punted 10 times for 513 yards, which means their punter outgained their entire offense by 371 yards. The two teams combined for six turnovers. This is the lowest-scoring win in the vault by a team that did almost nothing, which is a very specific kind of greatness.
5 points: Auburn 3, Mississippi State 2 (2008)
The baseball score. Auburn gained 315 yards, Mississippi State gained 116, and the two of them produced a field goal and a safety across 17 combined punts. Mississippi State's 2 remains the loneliest number in the vault: a safety, standing alone, in a game the Bulldogs somehow stayed in until the end. Auburn quarterback Chris Todd threw for 154 yards, no touchdowns, and a win, which is a stat line that should be framed somewhere as a warning.
9 points: Alabama 6, Tennessee 3 (2005)
Zero offensive touchdowns, per the data, in a game between Alabama and Tennessee at Bryant-Denny Stadium. Brodie Croyle threw for 190 yards for the Tide, Kenneth Darby ran for 86, and every one of the game's nine points came the hard way. Tennessee turned it over four times. Rivalry games are supposed to produce classics. This one produced a kicking exhibition with a century of hatred as the undercard.
9 points: Wake Forest 6, Virginia Tech 3 (2014)
The sickest entry in the vault, pound for pound: this game was 0–0 at the end of regulation. Nobody scored for sixty minutes. Wake Forest won it in overtime with the teams combining for 488 yards, 18 punts, and 734 punting yards. And a footnote the data insists on: John Wolford was Wake Forest's leading passer in this game (160 yards) and in the 3–0 Boston College game above (109 yards). One quarterback, two of the three lowest-scoring games in the vault, both wins. There is a banner in this somewhere. There should not be, but there is.
10 points, three ways
Iowa 6, Penn State 4 (2004) is the connoisseur's pick: Penn State scored 4 points, the teams combined for 315 total yards, each punted seven times, and Penn State turned the ball over five times in its own building. Auburn 7, LSU 3 (2006) saw Auburn win with 153 total yards of offense while LSU's JaMarcus Russell threw for 267 in defeat. Air Force 10, Wyoming 0 (2009) is the purist's entry: Air Force won a game in which it passed for 2 yards. Two. Wyoming threw for 74 and lost anyway.
The 13-point honorable mentions
Oklahoma's Landry Jones threw 58 passes and 5 interceptions in a 10–3 loss at Nebraska in 2009, a game Nebraska won with 180 yards of offense and 11 punts. Boise State beat BYU 7–6 in 2012 while scoring zero offensive touchdowns. Notre Dame and NC State played through Hurricane Matthew in 2016, 311 combined yards in standing water, NC State winning 10–3. Georgia beat Clemson 10–3 in 2021, also with zero offensive touchdowns from the winner. Even the good teams in the vault are here because something went gloriously wrong.
For perspective, the same 64-game vault tops out at 146 combined points. The eight games above produced 59 points combined. That is the range of the collection, and if you want to identify these masterpieces from their stat lines alone, that is exactly what Box Score Autopsy asks you to do daily. Our craziest box scores post covers the other end of the vault, where the scoreboard needed a third digit.