2023 Macadoodles Mailbag: 9th Edition

GD: Two general statements to start: 1) Most people have a desire to be liked. 2) I assume most fanbases do the same thing.

But the only fanbase I deal with consistently is this one and Missouri fans do seem overly concerned with what other people think. I've been covering Mizzou for 20 years plus two in college. For all 22 of those years, Missouri has been in a conference that the fans are convinced has it out for them. All refs hate Missouri. Every national writer hates Missouri. We've actually reached the point this basketball season where computers hate Missouri.

Here's my opinion: Who cares what anybody else thinks? You like your team. It really doesn't matter if anyone else does. I get the idea that if you're nationally ranked or if someone writes a really nice story about you that's good publicity. But the best publicity is just winning. Win and you'll be relevant and talked about positively. The truth is, Mizzou hasn't done much winning in the last eight years. It's not that people hate Missouri; it's that Missouri hasn't done anything to make anyone like them. That's changed this basketball season. Missouri has done quite a bit to make people take notice. And they have. There have been national stories written about the job Dennis Gates has done. He's on multiple national coach of the year lists. He didn't win the SEC Coach of the Year. It's not because anybody hates him or disrespected Missouri; it's just because a few people had a different opinion.

GD: You might be right. I'm not sure the numbers support it. In 2021-22, Missouri's average attendance was listed as 3050. I looked up numbers in Sophie Cunningham's first two years and they were about 3200. In looking at box scores her last two years, numbers went up some, but non-conference games were still generally between 3,000 and 4,000 and SEC games were mostly 4,000 to 5,000. The program loses more money than any other program at the school pretty much every year (with full scholarships, all the travel and the general lack of attendance plus pretty cheap tickets, that's just the way it's going to be). So would Mizzou fans support women's basketball? If Missouri reached the level of Tennessee or South Carolina, sure. Would it be enough for the program to make money? Still probably not.

And that's a big part of the equation here. Do you spend money (it would be between $800 thousand and $1.2 million) to make a change in a sport that loses money every year anyway? Maybe. A million bucks isn't that much money for the athletic department. By the same token, is making a change going to make a major impact? I don't know.

I see both sides of the coin here. I don't really have a strong opinion either way. Whatever they do, they do. There's a portion of the fanbase who is definitely invested in women's basketball, but it's not a big portion and they're mostly going to be invested regardless. If it's important to Missouri to be good in every sport across the board, an argument definitely exists to replace Robin Pingeton. But if they decide to just ride it out for two more years to save a little money, overall, not that many people are going to object. I don't know what they'll do.