While records seem to fall every other season in college football, the NCAA all-time scoring record has stood in men’s college basketball for 53 years.
With Detroit Mercy falling in the opening round of the Horizon League tournament on Thursday, Antoine Davis will end up two offensive possessions short of moving past Pete Maravich’s record.
The Titans were the last team to qualify for the conference tournament, as the Horizon League only allows eight of their 10 teams to compete for the lone conference berth in the NCAA Tournament. Top seed Youngstown State led 49-47 with 12:42 left in the second half, but did not lead again until 66-64 with 91 seconds remaining.
Davis finished with 22 points, when he needed 26.
The conference currently has four teams with 20 or more wins (Youngstown State 24-8, Milwaukee 21-10, Cleveland State and Northern Kentucky are both 20-12) going into semifinal play on Monday night. Detroit Mercy is 14-18 and will be failing to partake in March Madness for the 11th straight season. The last time the Titans made the field of 64 was their conference tournament win in 2012, where they would fall in the first round to eventual national runner-up Kansas.
Youngstown State has never made the NCAA Tournament since joining Division I in the 1981-82 season. In fact, the Penguins have only ever qualified for the CIT tournament in 2013, where they lost in the second round.
Maravich was a three-time national scoring leader at LSU between 1967-70. His 3,667 points in only 83 games meant a 44.2 point-per-game average in his three seasons in Baton Rouge. Only 11 players in the history of the NCAA have surpassed 3,000 career points. Maravich was more than 400 points clear of any challenger since Freeman Williams since 1978. Of the top 25 all-time scorers, only four have made the Basketball Hall of Fame (Maravich, Oscar Robertson, Elvin Hayes, and Larry Bird). Maravich lost a year of eligibility his freshman season, as the NCAA had a rule that first-year players could not compete at the varsity level.
Remember that the NCAA did not adopt the shot clock until 1985, and the three point line until 1987.
Davis was a walk-on at Detroit Mercy in 2018, after not receiving any offers from a major Division I school. He was the 2019 Horizon League freshman of the year, won the last two conference Player of the Year honors, and is the NCAA all-time leader in three pointers made (588). At 24, Davis is likely to be a first round pick in this summer’s NBA draft, likely in the middle to back-end of the lottery.
With Detroit Mercy being invited to The Basketball Classic last season with a 14-15 record, this tournament has not been confirmed to return this month. There is hope for the Titans that they could be selected for the College Basketball Invitational (CBI) for Davis to get the three points needed to tie Maravich’s record. However, the CBI requires schools to pay an entrance fee. For 2023, that fee is $50,000 per school.
Typically the CBI offers invitations to schools that missed out on both the NCAA Tournament and the National Invitational Tournament (NIT), but have winning records. Oftentimes these are schools where a regular season champion from a one-bid conference lost in their conference tournament before reaching the final.
For the Titans to go out in the first round and have a losing record, Davis eclipsing the mark in a third or fourth-tier tournament might actually taint his record, whatever the final total would end up being.
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