ESPN Men's Basketball

Thursday, I made note of Iowa guard Devan Bawinkel's "12 trillion," the stat by which Bawinkel played 12 whole minutes of a basketball game without registering a single other statistic, thus giving him the famed trillion pioneered by Ohio State walk-on genius Mark Titus. (You already know about Titus by now, don't you?)

The 12 trillion is a remarkable and unfortunate thing; Titus has clear rules against extending any trillion past three or four minutes because there comes a point when the stat stops being polite and starts getting real, and that's when you realize you're actually just hurting your team. The trillion's not so fun then.

Anyway, both I and Adam Jacobi from Black Heart Gold Pants thought Bawinkel's trillion had to be the longest in history. It's almost impossible to play that many minutes of basketball without committing a foul or taking a shot or dropping a dime, right? Wrong. One intrepid Hawkeye Lounge reader called up a list of recorded trillions, the longest of them being -- get this -- 31 trillion. 31 trillion!

It's true. On Wednesday, Jan. 3, 2001, Mississippi Valley State Delta Devils guard Elvis Robinson played an entire 31 minutes -- second most on his team -- without recording a single stat. 31 trillion. You can see the box score right here. It's ... it's beautiful. It really is.

So feel better, Devan Bawinkel. Your 12 trillion is still quite a feat. But it's a long way to the top if you want to be king of the trillion mountain. Which you don't.

Before tonight, there were two winless teams in college basketball. Now there is one.

A tip of the cap is owed to Alcorn State, which entered the night 0-24 and notched its first win of the season tonight, a no-doubt thrilling 55-54 win over Mississippi Valley State. It's not exactly an upset of the century-type win. After all, the Delta Devils (great nickname, by the way) have won just six games all season themselves. But for a team that by this point had a legitimate chance to go winless, a win is a win is, mercifully, a win. The Braves are off the schneid.

The same can not be said for downtrodden Bryant, who, yes, dropped to 0-26 tonight with a loss to Robert Morris. The Bulldogs actually led for much of the second half -- an impressive enough feat against a team with a good chance of making the NCAA tournament -- only to give up the lead at the 4:37 mark, never to regain it.

Bryant's ignominy has gotten plenty of attention lately. The Bulldogs scored 34 points in a loss to St. Francis Thursday night, earning them some sardonic Scott Van Pelt attention on that night's late edition of SportsCenter. (Van Pelt held up a card with the number of Bryant's wins. It said zero. Ouch.) It's entirely possible Bryant will lose its four remaining games, but if it does win, that win will likely come either at Wagner or at home against St. Francis. If it doesn't, Bryant will be the first team since everyone's favorite winless squad, the New Jersey Institute of Technology, to complete a winless season -- and only the seventh team to do it all-time. Suspense works both ways -- I'll certainly be watching.