The Southern University Jaguars aren’t a great basketball team this season. They’re not even a particularly good one, as they went 3-9 in their first twelve games of the season.
Several of those 12 games came against teams that essentially paid the Jaguars a fee to show up and act like tackling dummies for the big-time teams to practice against.
These “buy” games for Southern included contests against teams like Marquette, Arizona, Baylor, and Florida. Southern, along with many other, less affluent schools that employ the same money-raising tactic in both football and basketball, need these games to help balance out their athletic budget.
For Monday, Southern turned the tables and scheduled a payment game of their own. The victim for the Jaguars was the Champion Baptist College Tigers, a team from a vocational school in Arkansas that was founded in 2005 and boasts a student body of 250. The game quickly got out of hand and Southern ended up with an eye-popping 116-12 win.
The Tigers were overmatched from the opening tipoff and Southern put the game away almost immediately. The Jaguars led 22-0 seven minutes into the game and ended up scoring the first 44 points of the game, an NCAA record. CBC scored its first points on a pair of free throws with 5:15 left in the first half, which came as a surprise to Southern coach Roman Banks.
“I didn’t even realize they hadn’t scored until then,” Banks said. “They made a free throw and then everyone starting clapping. I looked at the scoreboard and then asked my assistant if that was the right score. I had no idea. It surprised me.”
To his credit, Banks genuinely seemed as though he didn’t set out to embarrass the Tigers, as he played all eleven of his players at least 13 minutes in the game. Hopefully, Champion Baptist’s players got a thrill out of playing against a Division I team. It seems as though money factored into the decision to make the trip to Baton Rouge to play the Jaguars.
“I assume it’s a budget-balancer for them as well,” said Southern athletic director William J. Broussard.
Dylan Sinn is a freelance contributor for CraveOnline Sports. You can follow him on Twitter @DylanSinn or “like” CraveOnline Sports on Facebook.
