If you had a rough night at your local league last weekend and finished with a 150, don’t feel too bad. This past Sunday, a score like that would have made you a PBA Tour champion.

In a match that opened jaws even for seasoned bowling spectators, Marshall Kent outlasted top seed Boog Krol to win the 2026 PBA Indiana Classic.

The final score of the title match instantly set three new PBA Tour records - lowest title match in PBA Tour history, lowest combined match score on national TV, and lowest winning score on national TV.

Maybe it is not the record you'd ever want to break, but hey - a record is a record.

What makes this even crazier is that the whole week was a scoring fest.

The Mike Aulby 39-foot oil pattern was producing big scores - according to Lanetalk stats, the field averaged 234 throughout the entire week of qualifying. Even during the stepladder finals, before the title match, players were averaging 219, including Timmy Tan’s 172 against Tackett.

But when the lights came on for the trophy match, something changed.

Marshall Kent walked off the lanes with his eighth career title, but he wasn't exactly celebrating with a backflip. He looked exhausted.

Just half an hour earlier, he was carving up the lanes with a 250 game using a Hammer Zero Mercy Solid in the semifinal against EJ Tackett. Then, suddenly, it was pins who showed zero mercy for Kent.

"What really threw me for a loop was the second frame when I 2-8-10’d. Then I changed balls and washed out, because to me, it felt like those two shots should have come off the pattern down lane a lot harder than they did. I didn’t think they warranted the results they got, and I think because of that, I got subconsciously scared to throw it to the right again," Marshall Kent said to the media after the match.

"I overcompensated, hit the living crap out of it at the bottom, and made sure it didn’t get there. Then I ended up missing the headpin left twice in a row. I’m not going to lie - in that moment, I felt really kind of down and defeated."

Luckily for Kent, his opponent, No. 1 seed Boog Krol, was throwing shots just as bad. Maybe even worse. At least the scoreboard above the lanes said so.

"I think Boog threw the ball way better than he scored, for sure. It just seemed like every little tiny miss was the absolute worst result you could think of. It wasn’t like we were getting away with anything," Kent said.

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With both bowlers failing to pick up spares, not to mention building any strikes, Kent realized that doing the "right" thing wasn't working. He decided to throw a Hail Mary, changing his entire strategy on the fly. Luckily, it paid off.

"When that window opened for me, I said, 'I just have to change balls, change lines, just change everything and hope it works out,' because obviously what I was doing wasn't working. I just got fortunate enough that I made the right guess at the right time. Boog made a great shot in the 10th when he needed to, and - kind of the theme of the game - 4-7-9. I don't think he deserved that result on that shot. It was about as good as you could execute in the moment, and he got absolutely penalized for it. It was just a strange match in general, but I’m very fortunate to be coming out on top."

One of the biggest elephants in the room was Krol’s decision to stick with urethane.

In a five-man field, he was the only one to keep Hammer Black Urethane in his hand during the finals, and the community was quick to second-guess the move.

It’s hard to argue with the logic, though. Krol rode that same urethane strategy through Friday’s elimination rounds, averaging a massive 255 to snatch the top seed.

While most players wouldn't dream of touching urethane, Marshall Kent was quick to defend Krol for sticking to his guns.

"I wasn’t really sure because, personally, I wouldn’t. But he also took the lead in the last block of qualifying doing that, so I could see it. He has a little trick he can do better than most people; even when urethane doesn't work for a lot of guys, he has his own way to make it work late in the block. Honestly, if I was him, I probably would have made the same call. That’s just the hard part about bowling on TV - you have to make those calls in the moment and commit to them. Sometimes you just make the wrong guesses, and sometimes you make the right ones. It’s just the nature of the beast."