[OT] What Is the Rarest Single-Game Feat in Sports?

[KeithK]

[q]How about Cornell women's polo. Five straight national championships! [/q]Again, it's easier to dominate a smaller field.

[dss28]

Actually, the UCONN domination that happened this year is pretty amazing... and both were single games... can that count?

[Tom Pasniewski 98]

[Q]dss28 Wrote:

 Actually, the UCONN domination that happened this year is pretty amazing... and both were single games... can that count? [/q]

No it doesn't.  ::rolleyes::   Seriously though it's a team accomplishment and it's like saying that Cal Ripken's record setting consecutive game was a rare feat.  That one game wasn't - the games that all led up to it were.

I'm going to offer up that king of sports....that king of smoke-filled rooms and cheap beer....bowling.  Well the smoke is gone and in many places so is the cheap beer as more and more new alleys have become ultra-luxurious.

There are those that will argue that bowling is not a sport but having bowled about 600 or 700 games before I turned 18 and enough since to be closing in on 1,000, I can say that there is a lot of athletic ability involved that can be fine tuned through building upper body strength and increasing your balance and coordination especially as you lower your center of gravity.  Plus there's an NCAA Bowling Championship.

So, recreational bowlers might think bowling is just one game but in competition, it's a three-game series.  The 300 game is not all that rare but still an amazing accomplishment.  However, THREE 300-games for a 900 series (perfect series) is a very rare feat.  The American Bowling Congress (ABC) oversees such official records and prior to 1997, it happened 11 times in where a league official was on hand to document it but the ABC did not sanction any of those because of improper lane conditions.  Improper. lane conditions is beyond the scope of this thread but what you see on tv which even I admit is very boring to watch are official lane conditions.  In 1997, the first official 900-game series was recorded and it happened again in 1998 and in 1999 - three official 900-series in total.  That's 36 consecutive strikes if you're keeping score.

With the sheer number of people who go out and bowl on any given day because of low cost and greater accessibility, the 900-series is truly a rare feat by an individual.

[billhoward]

Sports Illustrated in the past year listed some ten greatest performances by athletes where it could be a game, a season, a career, a single event. I'm trying to recall if it was college only or all sports. Dryden's three-year career at Cornell was one of them.

[Greg]

It was college: http://www.members.cox.net/tbrwmisc/legends/dryden.html

[Robb]

[Q]KeithK Wrote:
Again, it's easier to domnate a smaller field.[/q]

Not sure I completely buy that.  Carrying the argument ad absurium, my older brother and I played nearly 2000 games of ping-pong during our high school days.  By the time he left for college, he had won about 10 more games than I had.  The "field" was so small that we learned the other's game to the point that we were almost exactly equal...  

Michigan has managed to win 9 titles out of the 60 or so NCAA championships awarded - not too shabby.  Say there were an average of 40 teams or so playing, then each team "should" have won 1.5 titles, so Michigan is 6x ahead of the game.  Contrast that with D-1 women's soccer, which is currently sponored by 295 schools (not exactly a small field).  Even assuming that there were only an average of 100 teams per year (i.e. a relatively recent explosion in the number of teams), each team should only have won 0.23 out of the 23 championships awarded.  UNC's 17 titles puts them at 73x the expected value - much more dominant in a much larger field.

[KeithK]

My comment was that it's easier to dominate a smaller field, not that a smaller field will be dominated.  Even aside from the obvious absurdities in your ping-pong example, it would probably be easier for you or your brother to dominate your mini "field" than to dominate a league with 200 people.

You note that Michigan has won 9 of 60 NCAA titles.  But the Wolverines illustrate my point.  They won 6 of their 9 in the first 9 years of the tournament.  They had an easier time racking up the championships in the 50's when there were many fewer teams and the talent wasn't spread around very much.  

Note: I said illustrates my point, not proves.  It's not easy to prove this kind of theory beyond reasonable doubt, or even preponderance of the evidence.  But I think the evidence does lead to this conclusion.  

[billhoward]

There's size of the field and quality of the field. Before the Ivies left Division I in football, the nine of us conceivably were in the hunt for the NCAA football championship in end-of-season polling. Realistically, we were just nine more schools.

[Rosey]

[Q]billhoward Wrote:

the nine of us[/q]

Nine?

Kyle

[billhoward]

[Q]krose Wrote:

 [Q2]billhoward Wrote:

the nine of us[/Q]
Nine?

Kyle[/q]

The Ivy schools playing football, the nine, er, eight, of us.

[KeithK]

[q]Nine?[/q]He's including Colgate no doubt... :-P

[Greg Berge]

I thought it was a Chestnut Hill joke.

[dss28]

Or including Radcliffe... :-P

[Josh '99]

[Q]KeithK Wrote:
He's including Colgate no doubt...  [/q]Well, they WERE invited to join the Ivy League.  ::rolleyes::   ::screwy::

[jtwcornell91]

[Q]dss28 Wrote:

 Or including Radcliffe...  [/q]

Or Barnard. :-P