Alabama outlasts South Carolina in a wacky, four-OT game full of oddities

No one word can describe the 60 minutes of basketball played by Alabama and South Carolina Tuesday night in Columbia. But three words, in conjunction with each other, can do a pretty good job.

Alabama-South Carolina was glorious. Alabama-South Carolina was appalling. Alabama-South Carolina was exhausting.

Glorious because of the endless twist and turns, and the delirium of the latter overtime periods. Appalling because the offense played in the game — neither team scored more than 90 points in 60 minutes — was grotesque. And exhausting because, well … FOUR OVERTIMES.

The end result — Alabama 90, South Carolina 86 — was also a massive win for the Crimson Tide over the 19th-ranked Gamecocks on the road.

But the fun was in those preposterous 60 minutes of basketball. Where to begin?

How about with the first half, when South Carolina attempted 30 field goals, and made just three. And no, you didn’t read that wrong. The Gamecocks were 3 for 30! They trailed 32-16 at halftime.

Sindarius Thornwell missed all eight of his first-half field goal attempts. That same Sindarius Thornwell went on to score 44 points, more than half of his team’s total, with a ridiculous stat line, especially when viewed within a traditional box score:

Thornwell attempted 33 free throws, the most ever in an SEC game, and went for 44 points and 21 rebounds. It was only the third 40-20 game by an individual player in the last 20 years. The only other players to do it in that time? Norris Cole and Blake Griffin.

Just as ridiculous is the fact that South Carolina took the game to four overtimes while shooting 26 percent and 16 percent from beyond the arc. It scored 0.82 points per possession, and didn’t make its 10th field goal of the game until there were less than four minutes remaining in regulation.

The Gamecocks are the top defensive team in the country, though, and hung around by getting stop after stop in the second half. They trailed by nine with three minutes to play, but chipped and chopped their way back into the game, then got to overtime via some missed Alabama free throws and a Thornwell jumper with 12 seconds on the clock.

Alabama had final possession chances to win the game in regulation, the first overtime and the third overtime, but failed on all three occasions.

In the first overtime, the two teams combined for just two made field goals. South Carolina didn’t score a point over the final 2:44 of the period. Alabama scored just one in that time.

South Carolina actually took a seven point lead with two minutes to go in the second overtime, but coughed the lead up, only to have Thornwell again breathe the team back to life with a layup in the final seconds:

South Carolina’s Riley Norris finally put an end to the madness with four free throws in the final minute of the fourth overtime.

By the merciful final buzzer, three players on each time had fouled out, and three of Frank Martin’s South Carolina players had played 54 minutes or more. Thornwell played 56.

It was the first quadruple-overtime game in the history of South Carolina basketball, and the first of this season in Division I. The last one, you ask? Let’s let Jalen Adams answer that:

The game scheduled to follow South Carolina-Alabama on the SEC Network, Arkansas-Vanderbilt, didn’t get joined by the broadcast until there were 12 minutes left in the second half.

It’s tough to get analytical after such a wacky hoops marathon, but if there’s one takeaway in the aftermath, it’s that South Carolina threw away its precious lead in the SEC. It’s now tied with both Kentucky and Florida after both the Wildcats and Gators won Tuesday night.