CHAMPIONSHIPS HISTORY: Highest Scoring Teams All-Time in Each Championships Event

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.

Like every other part of our massive report on the history of the Division I championships, this report— the team points leaders by event—could analyzed from dozens of different angles.

Some things that I’m not going to delve into, but could: the best teams by event group, the best team event performances of bygone eras, and the teams who have packed all of their event points into the least amount of years. I’m forsaking all of that  (but you don’t have to!) to look at the two biggest picture categories.

1. Total Domination

One of the best ways to smooth out historical differences and truest ways to compare across events, sexes, and eras is performance relative to competition. Using extremely unsophisticated math, we can see which schools have not just totaled the most points in a given event, but dominated that event the most historically.

For each event, I took the gap between the best and second-best program and divided it by the number of points that the second-best program had. That’s the percentage more the best program has than the second-best program; I’m going to call that number the “domination factor.”

*defunct event

Three programs are so much better than everyone else in the history of an event that they’ve scored more than double the amount that the second best program in the event has—they would be LSU in the women’s 60 meter hurdles and Villanova in the men’s 800 and women’s 4×800.

There are eleven more instances of schools with a domination factor greater than 50, meaning they scored more than one and a half times the number of points of their closest historical competition.

Incredibly, the Arkansas distance men provide three of those instances—not only do they have the most points out of any program ever in the mile, 3k, and 5k, but they’ve outscored the rest of the country by more than a whopping fifty percent (eighty-five percent in the mile) in those three events.

2. Top Scoring Teams By Event

One of the challenges of comparing men’s and women’s raw totals is that the men had two extra decades in which to accumulate those totals.  As the below chart shows, though, the men’s advantage of extra years is offset by the top-heavy nature (a nature that is changing as women’s T&F matures) of the women’s events—seven of the fifteen highest single-event, single-school totals come from women’s teams, including the #1 total, Louisiana State in the women’s 60 meters.

Quick takeaways:

1. Every discipline except for vertical jumps is represented. Teams have racked up historically high totals in sprints, mid-distance, distance, horizontal jumps, throws, and relays. Historically, it hasn’t been easier to dominate one type of event over another.
2. The Arkansas men and the LSU women are really, really good. Eight of the ten highest totals for a program in a single event have come from those two teams. And while yes, the men’s meet had a massive head start on the women’s, the Razorback men only had an eight-year head start on the Tiger women here. John McDonnell’s men scored their first point on this list in 1977, and Billy Maxwell’s (and assistant coach Sam Seemes’s) women picked up their first point on this list just eight years later in 1985.
3. Most of the programs listed here are continuing to build their totals.  The three teams that cracked the top fifteen in throwing events have been stagnating for a decade or more— the UTEP men last scored in the weight throw in 1997, the SMU men in the weight throw in 2001, and the UCLA women in the weight throw in 2004. Everyone else in the chart has scored since 2009, and most scored in 2013 or 2014. Translation: this will continue to be a very, very hard list to crack.