CHAMPIONSHIPS HISTORY: All-Time Best Career Scorers at the NCAA Indoor Championships

This is the latest in a series of posts based on the USTFCCCA’s newly unveiled NCAA Division I Indoor Track & Field Championships History page – the most comprehensive collection of the meet’s history anywhere on the web – leading up to the 2015 edition March 13-14 in Fayetteville, Arkansas. The page can be viewed in its entirety here.

We’ve talked earlier in our history series about the conundrum of appreciating track & field through the long lens of history.  Here’s another facet of that challenge: the scoring system has never stayed the same for more than two decades at a time!

The present system of 10-8-6-5-4-3-2-1 (i.e. ten points for first place, eight points for second, etc., etc.) was only adopted in 1994.  From 1965-77, only five athletes scored in each event; from ’65 to ’67 it went 5-4-3-2-1, and switched to 6-4-3-2-1 from ’68 to ’77.  Then, from 1978 to 1993, scoring was expanded to six athletes: 10-8-6-4-2-1.

Our Tom Lewis has done the hard internet labor of translating those first three decades of meets into the modern scoring system—the point totals for each athlete below are how many they would have scored if today’s rules were in place.

Today’s installment tries to compare athletes across eras (notoriously difficult) and across event groups (nigh impossible). Who had the most prolific careers in NCAA indoor track & field history?

(Also, the list of active top career scorers)

MEN’S TOP SCORERS

Nyambui won the mile every year of his collegiate career and won the two mile every year except for his junior year, when Doug Padilla beat him by 0.02 seconds. The distance battles between the two were epic in 1981: in addition to their paper-thin margin in the 2M, Nyambui beat Padilla by 0.11 seconds in the mile that year.

While Nyambui’s total hasn’t been touched in the three decades since he graduated, if we’re going to apply modern rules anyway, Erick Walder could make a reasonable claim to the best indoor career in college history.  Walder was 23 his senior year, which is permissible under current NCAA rules; Nyambui was 29, which is not.

Another takeaway? It’s good to be a distance runner or horizontal jumper—each of the top nine scorers of all time did distance doubles or the long and triple jumps. So let’s give a little love to event groups.  Here are the best national meet careers by event discipline. (I considered the multis and hurdles their own disciplines, but combined the high jump and pole vaults under the auspices of “vertical jumps”)

Carter’s total is tied for the most of any athlete in NCAA history (men or women) in a single event—he won the shot put four times for forty points total. Nyambui achieved the same feat in the men’s mile, and no woman has yet scored the career sweep.

Who in the current ranks might join these lists? Though Arkansas vaulter Andrew Irwin is the active points leader with 25, he is in his final year of eligibility, is only qualified in one event—the pole vault—for this year’s national meet, and is facing off against Shawn Barber, arguably the best vaulter in college history.

So! The real threat to add himself to this list is Edward Cheserek of Oregon.  King Ches scored 20 points at last year’s meet, and could get halfway through his career with 42.5 if he wins the mile, DMR, and 3k at this weekend’s championship.  That’s more than the 40 that Nyambui had after two years in the NCAA.

WOMEN’S TOP SCORERS

As with the men, it’s good to be a horizontal jumper or a distance runner. Unlike the men, sprinters join the top ten list. The Nos. 1, 3, 4, and 9 women’s scorers of all time were primarily sprinters.

I say primarily because Carlette Guidry of Texas also scored 16 points in the long jump. How insanely good was Guidry? She scored her points in the 55, 200, LJ, and 4×4; if you took away any one of the 200, LJ, and 4×4, she’d still be the best indoor scorer in collegiate history.

No woman has won her event four times at indoor NCAAs; Georgia’s Kendell Williams has a chance, but is three long meets away from becoming the first.  Fellow pentathlete Jackie Johnson’s and triple jumper Kim Williams’s 38 points are tied for the most ever in a single event. (Williams went to Florida State, and Johnson went to Arizona State.)

Here are the best women ever in each discipline. I removed points that were not scored within said discipline.

The overall active leader in points is Kentucky’s Dezerea Bryant, with 32.  With Guidry’s preposterous total standing as one of the most unbreakable records in the sport, Bryant has no chance of taking over as the all-time leader in sprint points. But she does have a chance at cracking the all-time top ten in points.  She scored 18 points last year (winning the 200 and finishing second in the 60) and is entered in the 60, 200, and 4×400 this year.

Coming tomorrow: career points by event.