It’s Monday morning, so it’s time to let you all know what’s been rattling around my head for the past week.
Today’s going to be pretty much all basketball as we hit the SEC Tournament for the men and the coaching search for the women.
MEN'S BASKETBALL THOUGHTS
1. This skid to end the season has been about as bad as it could be.
This final stretch of four losses in five games has been ugly. No sugarcoating that.
Especially because it was just the same issue over and over again until the Kentucky game. A flat out inability to guard the paint without fouling is a recipe for an early exit in the tournament. But, bright side defensively, that wasn’t the issue in the Kentucky game for most of it (obviously the free-throw differential ended up being huge, but the Tigers sent Kentucky to the line more in the final four minutes than in the first 36 just trying to slow down the game). The defense clearly finally adjusted to try to put a stop to what had been killing it over and over again.
But Kentucky is an offense that is able to take advantage of any space from the outside as well, so that became the overriding issue on that side of the ball.
Offensively, it all still works great. The Tigers are averaging more than 90 points per game in the final eight games of the regular season, that’s incredible. They’re among, if not the, best offense in the country right now.
But it didn’t look that way against Kentucky because Tamar Bates, Ant Robinson and Caleb Grill all had a bad game at the same time.
I’ll take Grill out of this equation just to be even more clear, if Bates and Robinson are bad at the same time, it’s going to take a herculean effort from Grill or Mark Mitchell to carry the Tigers to a win.
Mizzou will go as far as Robinson and Bates carry them at this point. Even Grill can’t shoot them out of those two slumping at the same moment, and as we’ve seen down the stretch, repeated great performances from Mitchell isn’t enough to keep the team in front. ...
