First off, I want to mention I am stopping the March Madness voting here on the blog. The Polls feature on this platform is incredibly cumbersome. There is no template to do all at once; I had to manually create every single one. I should have realized it would be an absolute pain to do this, but I wanted to find a way to have Bluesky followers and folks who just read the blog participate too.

And then you, the reader/voter, has to click a link, leave the blog to vote, then click back into the blog and do that all over again and again and again. Also, each poll was incredibly diminishing returns on votes due to this process; the first poll was at 48 votes submitted, the second poll at 32 votes, and maybe only 24 of you actually voted for every single poll. Which is incredible that you finished it because I did too, and it was so tough to complete.

Also, we were doing polls on multiple platforms, and it’d either lead to us having me manually add things up across each platform, or we’d get multiple champions, which would feel weird. I just want to apologize here for stopping the polls. I tried something, and it didn’t work out. Don’t worry, I told myself, Oh No! Disaster! What A Bad Idea! Many times when trying to make the past two posts.

So let me make it up to you with an extra Sickos blog post on another seemingly forgotten NCAA football record. This one about just fumbling the ball so much, kind of like how I fumbled the March Madness poll here.

Let’s set the scene a little bit. It’s a rain-drenched Tallahassee, Florida, in 1969. The Florida State Seminoles ended 1968 with a loss to LSU in the Peach Bowl, and they opened their 1969 campaign on September 20th. They welcomed in a team that doesn’t have a football program anymore in the Wichita State Shockers. Funny thing for the Noles, their season opened with the same weather as it ended with last year in the Peach Bowl.

A TORRENTIAL GAME LONG RAINSTORM!!

FROG-STRANGLING RAIN!!!!

Again, Wikipedia, for both of these teams, doesn’t really highlight what occurred in this game. (1969 Florida State Wiki and 1969 Wichita State Wiki). This is a record you have to hunt a little bit and oh, it is worth it.

The game itself wasn’t really close but we got to see many uses of the word fumblefilled in the newspaper though.

Now this game set the record for most fumbles by single team, most fumbles lost by a single team, most fumbles by both teams and most fumbles lost by both teams. It owns four out of five NCAA records associated with fumbling.

However, it did not set the record for most fumbles lost in a single quarter. So you are reading this right, Wichita State lost 10 fumbles, but it was balanced over every single quarter of the game not just in one quarter.

Wichita State had an absolutely miserable day in the steady rain in Tallahassee. They fumbled 17 times and lost 10 of them. Turning the ball over about 59% of the time when they fumbled. Florida State lost their fumbles at a 70% clip (7 lost out of 10 total).

Wichita State also threw two Interceptions for a total of 12 Total Turnovers. Now, that was just one shy of the total turnovers in a single game record of 13. However, they set the record for most turnovers for both teams with a total of 20 turnovers, 17 lost fumbles and three interceptions. I think my favorite stat is that the Shockers had more turnovers than first downs.

Here are the individual stats rushers of the game. I really wanted to know who was fumbling so much, but they didn’t list it. Six rushers ran the ball for Wichita State, and three of them finished with negative yards. Clearly, it seemed the Shockers' offense was overmatched by the Noles defense, but they just kept running it in the driving rains. The Shockers finished with 53 rushing attempts and a total of 29 yards rushing for an average of 0.55 yards per carry. Florida State had 44 caries for 137 yards for a 3.2 yard average per carry, with one touchdown.

Oh to be able to see things like this happen would have been glorious to watch.

“The Shockers couldn’t cope with an aggressive FSU defense.” The Shockers didn’t get into FSU territory until the Noles fumbled a punt. However, the Noles defense stopped them on a 4th and 6 to preserve the shutout. There were only seven fumbles lost in the first half. That means there were ten lost in the second half. (I kept the highlight of Shockers for you to really focus on the good stuff in the article)

I don’t think I could write something better than this by Jimmy Mann from the Fort Lauderdale News. So, I’ll just let Jimmy cook here.

Just imagining over 31,000 people soaked in the rain watching the teams fumble a total of 27 times brings me tremendous joy. This game was absolute insanity. I am trying to imagine a field so soaked it looked like an ice rink. Picture the players sliding for five yards after every single tackle. Continue, please, Jimmy.

A ridiculous performance indeed!

Wichita State fumbled the ball on 17 of their 74 offensive plays. That’s 23% of the time!! Nearly a fumble every single set of downs! 1st Down, 2nd Down, Third Down, Fourth Down! There was likely a fumble in there! They lost a fumble on 13.5% of the plays! Then you got to factor in they also threw two interceptions!!

Don’t worry, I haven’t forgotten that Florida State also fumbled 10 times too! They had 71 total plays with 10 fumbles! 14% of time they fumbled the ball too! They lost a fumble 9.9% of the time too!

TOTAL TURNOVER PERCENTAGES

Total Plays = 145 Plays

18.62% of the time there was a fumble on the play

11.72% the fumble was lost on the play

13.79% there was a turnover on the play

I really don’t have much more to say about this game and the absolutely astounding amount of fumbles that occurred in this game.

But I really need to scream one word really really loudly…