The final score of last night’s game: Texas Tech 167, East Central 115. That’s a combined 282 points. Not completely unheard of in the NBA, but keep in mind that college ball is played within 40 minutes and a 35-second shot clock. Without even considering free-throw shots, the teams attempted a total of 207 shots from the field, which breaks down to an average of a shot every eleven seconds.

Seriously, what sort of strategies were these teams employing last night? I didn’t watch the game live, so I can only guess that they used the approach conceived by every six-year-old who plays a basketball video game and refuses to press the “pass” button except when inbounding the ball. Just pass to whoever is open and mash the “shoot” button like mad. Is the player even past halfcourt? No? Tough nuts, junior, it’s showtime.

It took a game like this to lead me to realize basketball’s magnificent difference from other sports. If two people play a baseball video game and swing at every pitch, it will probably end a scoreless tie. If they play a football game and call a Hail Mary every play, they’ll never score unless the game of choice is NFL Sports Talk Football. But basketball, apparently, can be as highbrow or lowbrow as you want it to be. You can engage beautiful, elaborate offensive schemes, or you can just frenetically hurl the ball from wherever you want. I think we all knew that kid growing up — the kid who would do nothing but jam the square button on his Playstation controller for a game before throwing it down, declaring that “this game is boring,” and yell at his mother to bring him some Pop-Tarts. If last night’s game was any indication, that kid grew up to coach Division-1 NCAA ball. Who knew?

Also see: The Sporting Blog