The 300 Club

Just as 300 wins in a baseball career, a 300 game in bowling, or a 300-touchdown game for a running back is considered the mark of excellence, so too is "300" a level sought by all in Trivia. 300 points, that is!

The following is a list of all teams known to have scored 300 points in a contest. Do note the following, though:

Many final scores are not currently available, and so some teams may be omitted for that reason alone. Chief among the suspects are the two 1989-90 champions whose final scores are unknown: Son, There's a Panty on Your Head and Five Is Right Out. And naturally, their competition also may have topped the 3-0-0. Sadly, the surviving members of those teams are far too old and depressing to ask.

The contests of the 1970s did not feature 10-point Hour Boni or 25-point Supers, nor did they include many Actions, any Ultras, or other pointage potentials. A total sweep of bonuses then would have netted 6 Hour Bonuses' points worth of credit by today's standards—or less than half what an equivalent faultless performance would earn today. Therefore, even the absolutely greatest teams of that era had no shot of crossing the 300 plateau. Many (if not most) contests didn't even feature three hundred points of trivia in total. Some hypothetical scores of perfection were 281, 281 and 294 points in three separate winter contests that we know of (1973, 1978 and 1976). Extrapolating from the top teams' performances, however, there are several who would have easily qualified. The 245 of yesteryear is the 330 of today. The team that came the closest to hitting 300 points in Trivia's first decade and a half was probably Carter House in December, 1974. (Carter House would change its name to "House of Gee" before running its contest.) When BOMO scored a hefty 286 in Spring 1976, some players wondered on-air whether that might be the all-time record. The consensus was that no, House of Gee was still on top. A 290+ score for Carter/House of Gee in 1974 may well be equivalent to 370, a quarter of a century later. And you can look below to see where a 370 total leaves you.

Four teams alone notched 300 points in the 12/96 We Make Holes in Teeth contest. This is surely because of Teeth's "Mega Bonus," a 25-point concoction that boosted scores. Add that to their above-average 104 questions, and 55–60 points appear that hadn't been available in the previous two contests. (Still, three of the four teams had LOTS of breathing room, and would've had less gaudy 300+ scores in a typical 94-or-so-question contest.)

The high scores for the December 1986 teams can largely be explained by the 15-point Hour Bonuses and the 35-point Super Boni used by the host Giant Pygmies of Beckles that semester. Take away the extra 60 points, and We Start Bombing and Twice the Caffeine would settle nicely somewhere near 315 or 320. And yet, that contest only had 4 Actions, so they also COULD have topped 380. Aren't numbers fun? It's pretty clear that they and Gentle Tongue-Tongue are among the top squads ever... but probably not by this much of a margin.

And if you're really into blind adulation of numbers for their own sake, then do not neglect the May 1983 contest run by Smedley Terrace. Thanks to the experimental "video game scoring" system that semester, the top score in the history of Williams Trivia is actually Phasers on Stun's, with a whopping 292,000 points! In fact, the team Tiny Open-Faced Sandwiches finished a distant 12th that semester-- yet scored 109,631 more points than any of the teams listed below!

Essentially, what we're saying is that "300 points" is a happy little statistic, but one that is instructive of nothing much. It's completely at the mercy of a maelstrom of ever-changing semester-by-semester factors. It's no secret to say that a 270 score in a particular contest may be a far better performance than a 310 in another, or that more-or-less identical teams can earn notably different scores in two separate games. But, just as Pinklon Thomas and James "Bonecrusher" Smith can accurately say "I was in fact the HEAVYWEIGHT CHAMPION OF THE WORLD," the following teams can ever revel in their irrevocable membership in the prestigious 300 Club.

The 300 Club

Date Score Place Team
Jan 2016 382 1 Taha Noa Noa
Dec 1986 369 1 We Start Bombing in Five Minutes
Dec 1986 368 2 All the Sugar, Twice the Caffeine
May 2013 366 1 Requiem for the Blue Civic
Dec 1996 365 1 Gentle Tongue-Tongue He Weeps.....
Dec 1986 358 3 Anything Other Than Itself
Dec 1996 355 2 Bob Ross 3: Pimpbot 2000
Dec 1996 354 3 Many Shrubs and Zulus Knew What It Was Like.....
May 2002 340 1 Joanie Loves Trotsky
Jan 2016 340 2 Trapped on the Fourth Floor
Jan 2016 329 3 The Actual Cannibals
May 1990 326 1 Oxygen is for Losers
Dec 1998 326 1 I've Got Ives in My Pants
Jan 2016 326 4 THE ULTRAVIOLET CATASTROPHE
May 1984 324 1 Chicago 60609
Jan 2014 322 1 ANUSTART
May 1991 321 1 Phasers On Stun: The Next Generation
Jan 2016 321 5 Holy Cow
Jan 2004 320 1 Mortal Wombat
May 2005 320 1 Gratuitous Use of the Word "Belgium"
Jan 2008 320 1 I'm Oxford Dot Com
Jan 2016 320 6 Polar Vortex
May 1984 316 2 Round Up the Usual Suspects
May 2000 316 1 The Funk of 40,000 Years
Jan 2020 316 1 Too Early for Flapjacks
Dec 1994 315 1 Can't....Do....Plaid (thud)
May 1990 314 2 Miserable Fat Belgian Bastards
May 1993 314 1 The Purpose of the Military....
May 2001 314 1 I Say It's Duck Season, and I Say "Fire!"
May 2002 314 2 Culminating in a Spectacular Final Battle...
Jan 2020 314 2 Jack is da Bomb
May 1998 313 1 At 200 Miles Per Hour, There is No Diplomatic Immunity
Dec 1992 312 1 Your Plastic Pal Who's Fun to Be With
May 2000 311 2 We Have a Pregnant Geologist, And We're Not Afraid to Use Her
May 1985 309 1 Wile E. Coyote, Super Genius
May 1989 309 1 Harry "Snapper" Organs
May 2017 309 1 US vs. Good Time in Vegas
Dec 2001 308 1 Neutered Vampires Who Cheat at Kitten Poker
May 1998 307 2 Mark Taylor Has Only One Ass...
Jan 2016 307 7 Area 52
May 1989 306 2 There Can Be No Dialogue with Fungus
May 1990 306 2 Phasers on Stun
Dec 1991 306 1 Not Everybody Keeps Their Genitals in the Same Place
May 1997 306 1 Cthulhu Matata
Dec 2000 306 1 Holy Sack and the Resident Vomit Specialists
Jan 2016 306 8 Jack is da Bomb
Dec 1991 305 2 Play to Win and I'll Kill You
Jan 2003 304 1 Night of the Day of the Dawn of the Son of the Bride of the Return of the Revenge of the Terror of the Attack of the Evil Mutant Hellbound Zombified Flesh-Eating Subhumanoid Living Dead Part IV
Jan 2004 304 1 Human Hindenbergs
May 2004 304 1 Worker and Parasite
May 2013 304 2 SpAc3 Tigers
May 1995 303 1 Elvis Needs Boats!
May 1998 303 3 Dude, Being a Pilgrim Totally Sucks Ass!
May 1987 302 1 I Don't Have to Answer That Question!
May 1997 302 2 The Challenge of Mr. Sparkle
Jan 2012 302 1 BOMO
Jan 2020 302 3 Winston Churchill F***ed Me
Dec 1987 301 1 A Judo A Chop Chop Chop
Dec 1996 300 4 The Penultimate Supper
Dec 1999 300 1 Make Way for Ducklings, Motherfucker

Honorable Mention

Date Score Place Team
Dec 1987 299 2 Lick My Love Pump
Jan 2016 299 9 Invasive Yeasts and Where to Find Them

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