They say you should never ask how the sausage is made. But could asking about the ingredients of a Sausage King contest be even more vile and unsavory?

Let’s find out! Here’s a bunch of scoring data and details about the contest so entertainingly run by Abe Froman, Sausage King of Chicago!

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Four Oreos Away from Paradise’s 58-point margin of victory is tied for the fourth-largest in Williams Trivia history. Six years ago, the same group of players previously broke the all-time record for the largest-ever winning margin, with a 73-point win. Clearly they’re slipping.

Runaway wins are something of a trend. Of the fifteen largest margins of victory in Williams Trivia history, nine have come since 2010. One simple reason is because there are more points available. Some of the mid-1970s contests recorded what would have been perfect score totals, such as a 281 game in 1973, or 294 in 1976. Reputedly the Rule Six team achieved a perfect score in 1983, or perhaps just missed it; in any event, they scored 265 points. Abe Froman’s contest had more than 400 available points.

Nineteen teams scored at least 100 points in this contest.

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Just four teams stuck exclusively to the on-air questions and songs. They were Snap Ploobadoof with 157 points, Stink Tank (50 pts), BOMO (45 pts), and Phil is Bad at Trivia (18 pts).

Ploobadoof was the night’s top-scoring on-air team, with 15 more on-air points than the runner-up team in this category (Four Oreos).

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Meanwhile, there was just one team that only submitted bonuses and nothing else. The 112 bonus points for Happy New Year, Charlie Brown were 19 more than the runner-up team in total bonus scoring, Global Psychic Network of Testicles.

Charlie got the top score in five of the ten bonuses (Pokemon, Synthetic Supergroups, Cream, Richard Nixon, and the William(s)iana Super) They had a 6-point lead in Nixon, the largest margin for any team on any of the ten bonuses. (The Ultra Bonus also delivered a 6-point advantage.)

Six other teams had the high score on a given bonus. They were:
*Testicles (Text-Based Bonus)
*The Fellowship (Dakotas, etc)
*Jack (Pictograms)
*(tie) Four Oreos; and Band Geeks (Crossover audio)
*Area 52 (Show-Stopping Super (audio-visual))

The Pokemon Hour Bonus had the most submissions with 29. But no bonus had fewer than 17 submissions. In case anyone was wondering why Abe Froman unwillingly broke the record for the longest wait until the final scores, now you know why.

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The only team to do all seven Action Trivia was Four Oreos Away. Band Geeks and MD4 Doctors each performed six of them. The Instagram egg Action had the most participants with ten, while just three teams tried their luck at the smelly monster movie Action.

Both Oreos and Doctors notched the top score in an Action Trivia three times. No other team did so more than once, but there were three teams who did it exactly once: One Flew Over the Coup Coup’s Nest; Butt Wait… There’s More; and Band Geeks.

Two teams received a perfect Action Trivia score of 6: Four Oreos for their Williams PED football performance (which hopefully wasn’t illicitly enhanced), and MD4 Doctors for their don’t-smell-the-monster horror movie (which hopefully wasn’t filmed in Odorama).

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Despite 429 guesses from the field, just six teams correctly solved the Ultra Bonus. And four of them only did it on the final set of clues for the single mercy point. The two early bird exceptions were Jack in Hour 3, and Four Oreos in Hour 4, for 16 and 10 points respectively.

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The team that had the highest overall final score without topping any individual contest category was Trex’s Knees Are Way Too Sexy to Be Looked At, who finished the contest in 7th place. They did that by coming in third in on-air points.

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Geezers on Stun may have given a passing thought to the 40th anniversary of Giga, their ur-team that soon switched its name to “Phasers on Stun,” won twice, and became the first all-alumni team to compete regularly.

BOMO made an abbreviated appearance on the 45th anniversary of their first contest win. BOMO already holds the record for games played using the same team name, a running total which will hit 50 in the near future.

This was longtime player Des Devlin’s 70th consecutive contest, meaning he’s now played two-thirds of all Williams Trivia games. (I’m using third person here to sound all archival and official-like.)

P.J. Morello (aka The Lone Bayonette) is the only participant in the Abe Froman contest who also played a contest co-hosted by Williams Trivia founder Frank Ferry. That occurred 50 years ago.

Abe Froman, Sausage King of Chicago became the second Trivia champion to have the word “Chicago” in its team name. The other was Chicago 60609, who ran the December 1984 game and also debuted the pale green bowling trophy that they named after themselves. The same trophy was handed from winner to winner for the next 25 years. It was last seen in the possession of Silence in the Hub, but its current whereabouts are a tragic mystery.

No other Trivia champion has had the word “Sausage” in its team name.

Twelve champions have had the word “of.” One of them had the word “of” in its name nine times.

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After eight hours, Abe Froman’s contest wrapped up with Question #85. Not a surprise, since the last four Williams Trivia contests have averaged 85 on-air questions. And when I say averaged, I mean averaged. There’ve been 85, 84, 86 and 85.

Only one team in the 2010s has made it to a hundred questions, and that was Honey Bunches of Scrote in 2016, with 104. They also had the word “of” in their team name.

The last time we had two consecutive contests that reached a hundred questions apiece was in 2009, with Silence in the Hub and Stink, Stank, Stunk! Coincidentally, both of them made it to Question #107. Second Place Stars honored the intrinsic frustration of their team name by hitting #99.

Hundred-question games are becoming rarer for a couple of reasons, primarily the technical difficulties that seem to kill big chunks of time for four out of every five teams. But there’s also the matter of longer songs. Teams in the 1960s, 70s and 80s were playing a lot of Top 40 hits from the 1950s, 60s and 70s, where two to three-minute song length was the norm.

Over the past 25 Williams Trivia contests, only the three teams mentioned above have featured a Question #100. But during the 25 contests before that, there were six 100-question broadcasts: from hosts Gratuitous Use of the Word “Belgium”; Worker and Parasite; Joanie Loves Trotsky; Neutered Vampires Who Cheat at Kitten Poker; At 200 Miles Per Hour, There is No Diplomatic Immunity; and We Make Holes in Teeth!

Those six host teams point to another reason why and when a contest is most likely to make it to its 100th question. Neutered Vampires and 200 Miles Per Hour were separate iterations of the same continuing group of players. By that point they had racked up some experience in running Trivia. Those were their third and fifth hosting gigs.

And the other four 100-question contests each represented permutations of a second recurring squad of players: half of the Parasite and Joanie teams had previously been on Holes in Teeth, and the other half of Parasite and Joanie later split off and ran as Belgium. Some players on Worker and Parasite were running for the 8th time, and a handful were running their 11th and 12th contests.

Only one contest has ever fallen short of an 80th question, and that team was one of the freshman champions. Not only was everyone on the team running Trivia for the first time, it was only their second contest experience. However, they did have by far the most “of”s in their team name, and that’s got to count for something.

Moving further backwards to the 25 Williams Trivia contests before that (which were held from 1981 to 1993), there were no fewer than ten 100-Q contests, and probably a couple more whose totals are unrecorded. (Now we’re in the period where several of the contests’ final questions are not known.)

And before then, the contests of the 1960s and 1970s routinely surpassed a hundred questions. The Spring 1980 contest has the highest verified total with 118 questions, though there’s no way to determine whether that’s the most ever. However, it does represent a 40-question spread between the highest known contest total of 118 questions, and the lowest of 78.

While it’s completely arbitrary to break Williams Trivia into blocks of 25 games apiece (or 30, for the the earliest block), it serves to illustrate a conveniently neat progression in on-air trivia numbers. Within those four blocks of contests, Williams Trivia broadcasts have gone from hitting 100 questions practically all the time to half the time, then down to a quarter of the time, and now, to an eighth of the time.

In the first 70 Williams Trivia contests, the host team fell short of 90 questions just six times. In the 35 contests since then, it’s happened ten times.

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One last stupid note. On the list of all 105 Williams Trivia winners, Abe Froman, Sausage King of Chicago is now first alphabetically. So suck it, A Bunch of Mindless Jerks. You had a sweet 22-year run in this prestigious category, but now you’re nothing.

Here’s the first five:

Abe Froman, Sausage King of Chicago
A Bunch of Mindless Jerks Who'll be First up Against the Wall When the Revolution Comes
The Agard Memorial Tube Team
A Judo, A Chop-Chop-Chop
Alphabet Soup

And because you must be slavering to complete the circle of life:

Wile E. Coyote, Super Genius
Williams B
Worker and Parasite
Xanadu
Your Plastic Pal Who’s Fun to Be With

Aardvarks and zygotes... you competitive types now know what you must do.

—Des