Missouri has only won ten basketball games this season. It seems like kicking the program when it’s down to downplay one of those wins. But a 74-68 victory over Ole Miss on Saturday night provided just about as much ammunition for the the vocal crowd ready for change as it did to quiet the critics.
Mizzou closed the first half on a 12-2 run and then scored the first eight of the second half to go up 51-32 on the Rebels. It seemed at that point the result was ordained, but you may have noticed, nothing exactly comes easy for this Tiger team.
Over the next 16:05, Ole Miss outscored Missouri 32-18 to claw back within 69-64. Missouri used all 35 seconds of the shot clock, but didn’t take an actual shot, and the Rebels had a chance to make it a one possession game. They didn’t because Jarkel Joiner missed a three-pointer. After that, the Tigers made enough free throws and the Rebels didn’t make anything and Mizzou escaped with its tenth win.
It was…good enough?
Again, don’t look a gift horse in the mouth and don’t bitch about a win. I get it. This team isn’t good enough to complain too much when it actually outscores its opponent. But letting a bad Ole Miss team make a game out of one that shouldn’t have been a game hardly inspires much confidence.
The counter argument is that Missouri did enough in the final few minutes to win, which it often hasn’t this year. That shouldn’t be completely discounted. Nor should the fact that they haven’t played many teams worse than Ole Miss.
For much of the night, it looked like it would be a time those in attendance could go home feeling good. The Tigers’ 20-2 run was sandwiched around Brad Loos telling the crowd at halftime that his daughter Rhyan “is absolutely living her best life,” cancer free for five years now after being given just a 30 to 40% chance to survive when she was diagnosed with Stage 4 neuroblastoma six-and-a-half years ago.
Applause rained down on now 11-year-old Rhyan and plenty of tears surely flowed as she thanked Mizzou fans in a halftime video for “giving their money so I could survive.” Missouri announced donations of more than $52,000 for pediatric cancer research and the new MU Children’s Hospital.
The team—as it usually does on Rally for Rhyan night—was playing well, incoming recruit Aidan Shaw got a standing ovation from the crowd and it was a good night in the midst of so many that haven’t been very good this year.
And then, suddenly, it wasn’t.
“Just taking care of the ball and not trying to hold on to a victory, but win the game,” Cuonzo Martin said.
Martin added that “certain guys probably shouldn’t have the ball in their hands in certain situations.”
The issue, of course, is that there just aren’t that many guys. Missouri had eight healthy players (though the ones that were out don’t usually play much anyway). Kobe Brown had issues with cramping in the second half, Boogie Coleman fouled out and a team with limited options was even more limited.
“We kind of took our foot off the gas,” Javon Pickett said.
Missouri’s not nearly good enough to do that…at least not on most nights. It was on this one because the opponent has plenty of its own issues. But if the Tigers are going to make the last few weeks of the season interesting in some way, they’ve got to figure out how to play the way the did for the first 25 minutes for 40 on most nights.
As it Is, a season of “yeah, but” and “if only” trudges on. Saturday brought a win, but it didn’t come with a ton of reasons to feel good.
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