This D-3 coach scored 200 points in a game, but it came at a significant cost (2024)

GREENVILLE, Ill. — Before George Barber could radically overhaul his Division III program, before he could talk himself into discarding all traditional methods and scoring points like no other college team has ever done, he had to do his research.

Barber called Dave Arsenault Sr., inventor of The System at Grinnell College in Iowa, for advice on how to run the frenzied, hair-on-fire style. He flew in Gary Smith, author of a book on The System, for a week of instruction and insight. Along the way, Barber came across a statistical goal that System devotees whispered about. Among themselves, they called it the Holy Grail.

Could a team score 200 points in a 40-minute game?

It actually had been accomplished by NCAA teams. Twice, in fact. But both came against opponents so wildly overmatched that the games hardly counted as fair fights. Could it happen in a competitive situation?

Barber filed the idea of the Holy Grail in the back of his mind during his research phase and didn’t think about it much after that. Until, that is, the Grail called out to him last Feb. 2.

On that night, Barber’s Greenville Panthers grabbed and guzzled from the cup. On Senior Day against conference rival Fontbonne in Greenville’s cozy gym on Elm Street, the Panthers won, 200-146, Barry Nixon’s tip-in with two seconds left breaking the barrier. The home crowd stormed the court. The game attracted national attention, even earning Greenville a spot on that night’s “SportsCenter.”

“I told my players afterward, ‘You guys just went to the moon!’ ” Barber says. “With it being a conference game, this is as legit as it can get.”

Or was it?

Arsenault, whose Grinnell teams set many of the scoring records Barber would later break, says he always thought 200 points was possible. Yet it was so difficult, even in a practice setting, that he figured “it would require some late-game gimmicks.” The Panthers, it could be said, pulled their share of those.

Though the game was more than well in hand, Greenville continued to press full court and play its top shifts against Fontbonne. The Panthers committed two fouls in the final 21 seconds to get the ball back, and Barber called a timeout with 10.5 seconds remaining after his team had reached 198 points.

That’s why some don’t view the milestone as worthy of celebration. Especially the coach of the team Greenville beat that night.

“That was maybe the worst sportsmanship I’ve ever been involved in,” Fontbonne coach Lance Thornhill says. “Never in my wildest dreams did I think George would do that kind of thing to me.”

Thornhill had reason to believe Barber would ease off the gas pedal. The two had been close friends for more than 20 years. They played golf together, shared dinners and helped each other through tough times. Now? Eight days after 200, they were avoiding each other at the funeral of a mutual friend. They have not spoken since the historic night.

If you came here looking for a simple story about a curious stat, you chose … poorly. Greenville’s record-breaking performances raises broader themes. Like the nature of sportsmanship and friendship among competitors. And the cost of pursuing perfection and putting analytics before people.

It comes down to this: If the Holy Grail were at arm’s length but you had to hurt a close friend and be branded an outlaw by some of your peers to grab it, would you still reach for it?

Greenville University is a Christian-based school with an undergraduate enrollment of fewer than 1,000. Located almost 50 miles northeast of the Gateway Arch in St. Louis, it’s surrounded by farmland and not much else.

Barber, who’d served as an administrative assistant at Kentucky under Rick Pitino and was later as an assistant at Bradley, took the head coaching job in 1999. Like most Division III coaches, he wears a lot of hats; he’s a tenured kinesiology professor who teaches six hours a semester.

Before the 2015-16 season, school administrators came to Barber with a suggestion. Well, more of a directive. They wanted him to try running The System. This idea was less about winning games and more about enhancing enrollment and retention. Small private universities have struggled to keep up with the online diploma mills. Sports have proven to be a great way to get kids on campus and keep them there — and paying tuition — for four years.

Toward this end, Greenville officials told Barber to start a junior varsity team. The System dictates substituting players in hockey-style shifts after asking them to press fullcourt and fire 3-pointers at the first possible sign of daylight. It demands lots of bodies. Barber could maintain engagement from the JV squad by dangling varsity playing time. The St. Louis Intercollegiate Athletic Conference has no limits on the number of players a team can dress for a game. Barber regularly plays 16 guys and has 20 uniforms if he wants to stuff his bench. For team picture day earlier this month, Greenville suited up 42 players.

Still, Barber wasn’t sold on the idea at first. Smith gave him the tenets during his week-long visit: If you shoot 50 3s, snag 35 percent of the offensive rebounds, force 32 turnovers and take 25 more shots than your opponent, you will win 95 percent of the time. Smith’s University of Redlands team set the NCAA scoring record in 2005 by averaging 132.4 points per game.

The first time Barber unleashed The System was in a scrimmage against inmates at the nearby federal corrections institute. With Smith watching from the bench, the Panthers scored 91 points in the first half. OK, he thought, this could work.

Grinnell and other programs that employ The System often rely on a few stars, setting screens for them to shoot. Barber’s tweak was to recruit an entire team of drivers, dishers and chuckers. By eschewing ball screens, the Panthers could hoist 3s even earlier in the shot clock. They could play even faster, score even more points.

“While he replicated in principle what we were trying to accomplish, from a sheer Xs and Os perspective, our playing styles are dissimilar,” Arsenault says. “What he has created is a playing style that is all his own.”

Since the change, the Panthers have averaged 112.8, 129.7, 126 and last season a record 135.1 points a game. After years of also-ran status in the SLIAC with fewer resources than most of its peers, Greenville tied for the regular-season conference title in its first year running The System and won the league outright the next two.

“In 2016, we were fifth from last in revenue in all of Division III,” Barber says. “I have to personally raise $7,000 to $10,000 every year just to run my program. The System is the only way I can compete. I don’t have a lot to lose.”

Near the end of Smith’s week with the team in 2015, Barber asked him a question. When is enough enough? When do you call off the dogs in a blowout game?

Smith stared back at him blankly.

“The numbers are what’s important,” Smith says now. “You have to do anything within reason to get to them. To do otherwise would not be in the best interests of System basketball.”

When Fontbonne and Greenville matched up on Feb. 2, it was no ordinary game for either coach, despite the fact Greenville was 13-6, 10-2 in the league and Fontbonne was 8-12 and 6-7.

Almost a year to the day earlier, Fontbonne had upset the Panthers in overtime, 164-154. The 318 combined points made it the highest-scoring game in Division III history.

Thornhill always enjoyed the challenge of combatting Barber’s style and never minded pushing the breakneck pace right along with him. It was a rivalry, but a friendly one. A few years back, Barber landed in the hospital with a heart problem. Thornhill and his best friend, Denny McKinney, went to visit him. They grew disturbed by the erratic behavior from the other patient in Barber’s room, worried their friend would not get any rest in there. So they wheeled Barber’s hospital bed into the hallway and waited with him until he was placed in a private room.

So when Greenville took a 97-70 lead into halftime it was a bloated score for sure, but nothing that either coach found unusual. It wasn’t until the Panthers went up 173-127 with 6:18 remaining that Barber started thinking that 200 was within range.

“I had to make a split-second decision,” Barber says. “I thought, Lance set the record against me last year and he’s still running with me. So as long as they’re going to keep trying to score, we’re going to try and score.”

The Panthers kept the press on and continued hunting deep 3s despite building a nearly 50-point lead. Thornhill, though, didn’t suspect anything was up and assumed Barber would eventually relent.

“I told my assistants, ‘George wouldn’t do this to me,’ ” Thornhill says. “And I’ll be darned if he didn’t do it. Look, we could have tried to slow things down, pull the ball out. But I will run with him. We like to play a fast tempo too. But I’ve always been of the understanding that once you’ve got a team beat, you win with class.”

The final minute really eats at Thornhill. With the crowd on its feet chanting for the magical mark, Greenville committed a foul with 21 seconds remaining. It did so again in its own backcourt after Fontbonne inbounded the ball with 10 seconds to go. Barber had called a timeout right before that inbounds play. While he insists that only the final foul was intentional — “We foul all the time!” he says — Barber defends all of his decisions in the final seconds.

Gathering his players during the timeout, he recalls saying, “You will never in your lifetime be in position to score 200 again. So get the ball back and give yourself a chance to get 200. If you don’t get it, fine. But at least give yourself a chance to do something unbelievable.”

When it was over, Thornhill quickly shook hands with Barber but said nothing. One of Thornhill’s assistant coaches cursed Barber out, walked away, then circled back for some more choice words. Thornhill remains upset that none of the Greenville players, who were surrounded by some of the giddy 700 fans in attendance, shook hands with the Griffins.

“It was just all in very poor taste,” Thornhill says.

McKinney died of cancer shortly before that game. Barber attended the funeral the following Sunday. He and his wife sat in the back row and listened as Thornhill gave the eulogy. The two men barely made eye contact.

“I thought Lance was probably the best candidate for this sort of thing and that he would have understood us going for (200),” Barber says. “I could have been wrong in that assessment. Obviously I was.”

Think for a minute how improbable it is to score 200 points in 40 minutes. The Detroit Pistons scored the most points an NBA game in a 186-184 win over the Denver Nuggets in 1983. But that game went three overtimes, lasting 63 minutes. Troy, then in Division II, beat DeVry Institute, 258-141, in 1992. However, DeVry was a Division II NAIA school that only dressed seven players. In 2006, Division III Lincoln (Pa.) University scored 201 points in a game. But its opponent, Ohio State-Marion, lacked any NCAA affiliation and was a last-minute fill-in at a tournament.

To accumulate 200 in college regulation requires five points per minute. When the Panthers did it, they set NCAA records with 154 field goal attempts and 91 3-point tries. For the KenPom.com heads out there, that works out to 1.11 points per possession — a good but not great offensive performance, efficiency-wise.

But in what is more important to Barber, his team hit all of its statistical benchmarks that game, taking 55 more shots than Fontbonne. Barber has plastered the Greenville locker room with motivational phrases, and one he likes to point out reads, “De-emphasize winning.” Before each game, he asks his players who the enemy is that night. They know the answer: us.

“The culture puts a huge emphasis on winning and losing, and that’s the whole ball of wax,” Barber says. “We don’t ascribe to that philosophy. What we’re competing against is 50 more shots, 25 more 3s …”

Try persuading opposing coaches and players of that.

The unwritten rules of sportsmanship dictate that you empty your bench in the final minutes of a blowout win. You don’t press. You certainly don’t call timeout. You don’t intentionally foul. You don’t commit the cardinal sin: running up the score.

Cross those lines, and the consequences can be daunting.

Garfield Yuille was a second-year coach at Lincoln University when the Lions scored 201 points in that game against Ohio State-Marion 13 years ago. He received so much criticism and so many harsh emails that he cried, he told The New York Times. Yuille, who could not be reached for this story, avoided wearing any clothing with the word “Lincoln” on it while in public in the days and weeks after that game. He told the Times that he felt “everything was tarnished” by the 201-point performance.

Things went downhill for Greenville’s season after that night. In first place after the Fontbonne win, the Panthers lost three of their final four games. That included their first SLIAC conference tournament game against Eureka, in which Greenville was called for six technical fouls. Eric Williams finished second in the conference in scoring (23.7 points per game), Johari Dix was second in assists (152) and the pair led the league in steals. Yet no Panther was named all-conference.

“I believe some of the coaches didn’t vote for their guys because of that game,” Thornhill says. “To do what they did to a conference opponent, that didn’t sit well with a lot of people.”

After the season, Westminster coach and athletic director Matt Mitchell, who chairs the SLIAC basketball administrative group, summoned Barber for a chat. Mitchell says that as many as six coaches in the nine-team league expressed their distaste for Barber’s actions in the Fontbonne game.

“I felt like I needed to do something or at least say something,” Mitchell says. “There appeared to be intent at the expense of the Fontbonne players. I didn’t have an agenda going in other than to share the coaches’ feelings.”

Here is Barber’s account of how that meeting went:

“He tells me, ‘George, everybody is mad at you.’ So I go, OK, what do you want me to do? Matt says, ‘Maybe tell the other coaches that you’ll never score 200 points again.’ I laughed out loud. I said, ‘No I’m never going to do that again. And yes, I’m going to try to do it every game.’ ”

While he became a villain in his own league, Barber claims he got nothing but high-fives and backslaps from other coaches when he attended the Final Four and the NCAA recruiting combine in Champaign, Ill., this summer. He was the hero, the guy who scored 200 points. In his mind, the publicity he had gained for his little program remains priceless.

“Only in my conference did people have a problem with it,” Barber says. “I think it’s shortsighted. We’re showing you the forest, and you’re just looking at the tree.”

Not surprisingly, those who dedicated their careers to The System simply marvel at how Barber claimed the Holy Grail.

“I have no problem with how George managed the end of that game,” Arsenault says. “I understand why some coaches would. But I just feel that coaches who are willing to create special moments for their players should be celebrated, not criticized.”

“Sportsmanship is an ongoing concern, relative to System ball, when you get into a blowout game,” Smith says. “However, it doesn’t seem to me it was a complete embarrassment in that situation. If you’ve got a chance to go for 200, my goodness, you’ve got to do it.”

The only fallout Barber concerns himself with is the damage to his friendship with Thornhill. “It crushes me,” he says.

After being relayed Thornhill’s comments during the reporting of this story, Barber set up a meeting in Thornhill’s office for later this month. He hopes to explain his side of things, though he doesn’t see any reason to apologize.

“I’m willing to forgive,” Thornhill says. “I just don’t know how far we’ll get if he doesn’t understand that it was poor sportsmanship.”

They may never agree on how things happened. But it did happen. George Barber’s team scored 200 points, achieved the Holy Grail. The price might have been one friendship.

(Top photo of George Barber: Brian Bennett/The Athletic)