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

Honorable Mention

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