Winning Team: Carter House (circa 290+ points)
2nd place: Bomo
After winning in December, but before running the Spring 1975 contest, Carter House changed its team name to "House of Gee." "Gee" was named after a legendary Carter resident, and represented a transcendent state of drunkenness. It could also be used as a transitive verb, as in, "Let's go get Gee'd." Carter is the only team in history to switch its name as contest host.
For many reasons, overall team scores were lower during this period of Williams Trivia than the comparatively inflated totals that came with the 1980s and 1990s.
1970's Hour Bonuses were worth 5 points, not 10. And as an all-or-nothing proposition, few teams claimed all 40 Hour Bonus points (miss one question and get zero). Super Boni were worth 10 points, not 25. There was no Ultra Bonus. Trivia Actions were not worth 6 apiece. The 1970s had some small advantages for point-scoring: there tended to be somewhat more on-air questions read, and opportunities such as "Challenge Trivia" existed then. Still, any 1990s contest offers more than 100 new points that weren't available to the teams of the 70's.
For the above reasons, this archive's "300 Club"-- a listing of the top- scoring teams ever-- is 1990s-heavy. Contests of the 70s typically offered between 280 and 320 points, maximum.
So, although "House of Gee" (nee Carter) is not listed among the 300-point scorers, it is generally agreed that they enjoyed the highest score of the 1960s or 1970s. Exact numbers have been lost, but Carter's final total was almost certainly in the 290's. While 'compare-and-contrast' is a sucker's game, particularly with missing data, it takes precious little imagination to project a score around 370-375 had they competed today. Incidentally, no team has ever scored 370 points in any year.
Though it seems odd that perhaps the single most-successful team in any semester never repeated as champions, reconsidering the genesis of "to Gee" may explain it.
Other Teams Competing in Winter 1974 Included:
Hold the Anchovies
Williams E