Hacker Cinema
Quantum Hoops
2007 · Film · documentary · 85 min
Directed by Rick Greenwald
While most sports films celebrate the quest for a championship, "Quantum Hoops" follows a team that is searching for a single win. The documentary chronicles the final week of the 2006 Caltech basketball season. The team is currently in the midst of a 21 year losing streak - over 240 consecutive conference losses. Caltech is annually considered one of the top 5 academic institutions in the world yet its athletic department always takes a back seat to the achievements of its world renowned faculty, Nobel prize winners, and advancements in the world of science and technology.
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The NCAA is basically a joke when it comes to enforcing their rules on academic standards. This was made clear a couple years ago, when they hit Caltech with big penalties for lax academic standards, while basically ignoring things like the UNC scandal.
Caltech was fact was technically in violation, because it allows students to spend the first three weeks of each term taking classes without registering for them. The idea is that students can sample several classes they are interested in, then decide which they will stick with, and then register. For this three weeks, they are doing the work from all of the classes they are sampling.
However, since they are not registered for a full academic load during that three weeks, they count as part-time students, not full-time students, and so are ineligible for NCAA sports. Caltech's new director of athletics noticed this, stopped the violations, and reported his department to the NCAA.
The reaction of the press, both general and sports (Google "NCAA caltech" for details), was generally to make fun of the NCAA, and point out all the serious athletic schools routinely committing much worse, much more intentional violations.
Of course, some of the major sanctions won't have any effect. For instance, Caltech was banned from postseason play for one year. Considering that most Caltech teams are in the midst of years or even decades long losing streaks in conference play, they aren't going near the postseason anyway. They also banned off-campus recruiting...which Caltech doesn't do.
The only sanction that might have actually been noticeable was wiping out all wins of the ineligible teams. There was some initial concern that this would wipe out the basketball win over Occidental earlier that year that had snapped a 26 year, 310 conference game losing streak [1]. It turned out all the players on that team had been eligible, so the win stands.
[1] A movie was made about this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_Hoops
A documentary was made a few years ago on Caltech Basketball's impressive losing streak: Quantum Hoops.
http://www.quantumhoops.com/
Umm... Caltech sports teams? There's a whole movie, Quantum Hoops, about how we historically never won any game.