Ohio State hoop's Mark Titus has achieved relative internet fame with his blog Club Trillion, Life Views from the End of the Bench. Titus blogs about his unique experiences watching college basketball from the Buckeye bench. At first glance, his blog name seems to not have much deeper meaning, but you would be mistaken, my friend.
In Titus' words:
We named ourselves "Club Trillion" because as athletically limited white folk, we found ourselves riding the bench for the Buckeyes. When the time came for us to get in, there would usually only be 1 minute remaining in the game and after sitting down for 39 minutes, we really had no interest in trying to be all that productive. So we devised the plan of trying to get the "trillion" which occurs when we play 1 minute and do absolutely nothing that would appear in the box score, thus making our stat line say 1 minute played followed by a bunch of zeroes.
How these guys came up with something as genius as this, I'll never know. Titus played in likely his final collegiate game on March 2 against Illinois, recording one more trillion for good measure. Not to be outdone, however, was Iowa's Devan Bawinkel. Just one day after Titus' final trillion, the Hawkeye senior registered 12 trillion - 12 minutes without recording a single statistic. Impressive, or have we taken a good thing and simply gone too far?
College basketball is obviously full of trillionaires. This is hardly a rare occurrence, occurring quite frequently in the last minute of play when coaches clear the bench.
But this got me thinking. Who's the president of the BC chapter of Club Trillion? It turns out it's not exactly who you'd think it is. Of course, you initial gut reaction is that either BC bench players Nick Mosakowski or Peter Rehnquist are our team's trillionaires. However, you would be mistaken.
This year, no BC player has recorded a trillion. But the Eagles weren't without their close calls. Nick Mosakowski just missed achieving the feat in the home finale against Virginia (how dare he attempt a field goal!). Peter Rehnquist also had his brush with infamy in the season opener against Dartmouth (2 minutes, 1 personal foul). Cortney Dunn failed to reach a trillion in the strangest of ways against Harvard, playing 8 minutes and only cracking the scoring sheet with 2 blocks.
Evan Ravenel nearly achieved the feat on four separate occasions this season - vs. South Carolina (3 minutes, 1 personal foul), vs. Clemson (2 minutes, 2 personal fouls), at Virginia Tech (7 minutes, 1 FGA) and at Michigan (1 minute, 1 rebound). Oh, what could have been!
No, the president of the BC chapter of Club Trillion is none other than Tyler Roche. Throughout his career, Roche has amassed a whopping 9 trillion. Roche became a trillionaire in only his fourth game on the Heights, a 86-68 win over URI where he earned 1 trillion. Later in his freshman campaign, Roche backed up that performance with 2 trillion vs. Fairfield and 1 trillion vs. Miami Fla. Adding to his "wealth," he later posted a trillion in back-to-back ACC games against Miami and Georgia Tech in 2008, and 3 trillion in a game last season at Virginia Tech.
However, Roche's mark of 9 trillion isn't without its challengers. The current record of futility in a single game belongs to Biko Paris, who had a whopping 6 trillion in the road game at Blacksburg last season. Biko still has another full season to eclipse Roche's mark. Dallas Elmore and Cortney Dunn each have recorded 3 trillion in two separate games, so there's time yet for them to also overtake Roche's career mark.
So there you have it. Mark, please send Roche a Club Tril t-shirt.
It's just too bad that guys like Roche or the bench players that came before him didn't think of this first. Imagine the internet fame that they could have had by creating a meaningless stat for bench-warmers and blogging about their experiences on Al Skinner's bench.