Every week, PowerMizzou.com publisher Gabe DeArmond answers questions from Tiger fans in the mailbag. This format allows for a more expansive answer than a message board post. Keep your eye out each week to submit your question for the mailbag or send them to powermizzou@gmail.com. On to this week's inquiries.
jdw985 asks: What are your thoughts on the "culture" of basketball? I don't mean race/ethnically. I mean from a "me" vs "we" perspective.From AAU and high school, to college basketball, to the NBA, players are jumping from team to team more than ever. I get it from a player's perspective, you have to do what's best for you. At the same time, from a fan's perspective, this makes it harder to keep up and consequently harder to enjoy at all levels when there's hardly any consistency in who you're rooting for and fewer stories you can truly get behind. Basketball players (and all athletes) are bigger, faster, stronger, and more skilled than ever, but yet I don't enjoy it as much as I did (I'm in my late 20s). Is there anything that can be done about balancing player first vs team first or is the toothpaste already out of the tube?
GD: I think most of us agree free agency and the ability of players to have some control over what happens to them is a good thing. Maybe a few people want to go back to baseball in the 1910's when you were the property of whatever team signed you until that team decided to trade you to the Yankees, but for the most part, I think we all agree that it's better to have players treated as human beings rather than pieces of property.
I do understand what you're saying. It's fun to cheer for a guy or a group of guys who has been on your team for a long time. You form more of a connection with people like that. I grew up a Royals fan and it meant something that George Brett and Frank White played their entire careers there. It put them on a little bit of a different level than the guys who came from somewhere else or went somewhere else. But ultimately, I think we cheer for the clothes. If Missouri goes to a Final Four (not a prediction, just an extreme example) thanks to a roster made up of more transfers than "home grown" recruits who were signed out of high school, you're not going to like that team or enjoy that run any less. There's definitely something to what you're saying about forming a connection, but winning trumps the connection.
There's no going back on this. I don't think the transfer portal is ever going to be as crazy as it is this year (as of Tuesday I heard there were nearly 1400 basketball players in it), but it's never going back to the way it used to be. All things considered, that's a positive in my mind. It's like any other change. Eventually, we'll get used to it and it will just be the way it is. We're getting closer every year to the point where people just think of Missouri as being in the SEC and that's the way it is and has been. Obviously, that's a pretty recent change so there are plenty of us who remember the Big 12 and even the Big Eight, but in ten years, there are going to be a whole lot of fans who only know about those conferences because they've heard about them from their parents and grandparents. To them, Missouri has always been an SEC program. It's a change and people generally don't like change at the beginning, but we usually end up getting used to it.
The other part is the players. I don't think they try any less hard than they used to. Maybe Missouri basketball as a concept means less to the players on the team now than some of the guys we grew up watching who had a little more sweat equity in it, but I don't think they give any less effort. If you're playing sports at this level, you want to win, regardless of what jersey you put on before the game. And ultimately, that's the goal for everyone.
EMU13 asks asks: What skill position group on offense sees biggest jump production wise from Year 1 to Year 2 in Drinkwitz system?
GD: With Larry Rountree III gone, I'm pretty sure it won't be running back. And I don't see it being tight end on this year's team. So it's really either quarterback or wide receiver. And those two are inseparable. If Connor Bazelak has a much better year than he did a year ago, odds are his receivers are going to have better years as well. Rather than single out a position, let's go with one category. I assume we'll see a big leap in touchdown passes. Bazelak completed 67% of his passes, threw for 236 yards a game and averaged 7.3 yards per attempt. Those are all pretty good numbers. But incredibly, he only threw seven touchdown passes...and four of them came in one game. Part of the reason for that was the tendency to trust Rountree down around the goal line and he usually got the job done. Part of it was a lack of execution in the red zone in the passing game, which Drinkwitz and Bazelak both talked about this spring. And part of it was the lack of big explosive plays in the passing game. Missouri had only five players who had a catch of more than 30 yards last year (there were probably more than five plays that went for more than 30, but not a lot more). They've got to get more big plays, whether that's via a deep pass or a short pass that a receiver turns into a big play.
