The elements were all there. The student section was full 90 minutes before tipoff, “F— KU” was echoing off the walls and Truman was coming down from the rafters. It felt like the days of old and if you closed your eyes you could even believe you were back in the Hearnes Center.
But Missouri basketball is still a long way from what it was when it could go toe-to-toe with Kansas and the Jayhawks were all too happy to remind Mizzou how far it has to go.
If you want to boil it down to two reasons Kansas ran Mizzou off its home court by a final score of 95-67 it’s not hard: The Tigers shot 33% in the first half and barely 40% for the game and they allowed the Jayhawks to shoot 57.4% on mostly uncontested layups, dunks and three-pointers, including ten straight field goals in racing to a 26-12 lead. Missouri might not have beaten any of the nine patsies it played before Saturday with this effort. It most certainly wasn’t going to beat the first top ten team it played.
“There is championship DNA over in that other locker room. Those guys are top ten, whatever ranking they have for a reason. We’re in the infant stages,” head coach Dennis Gates said. “I’m not happy about the outcome. My players aren’t happy, our fans aren’t happy but we have to learn from the experience.”
These days happen in college basketball. They especially happen when you’re trying to dig out of a 12-21 crater with a mish-mash of mid-major talent and your most potent offensive weapon bolted to the bench for reasons that remain unknown. That the Tigers aren’t ready to contend with Kansas isn’t a surprise. But it’s still a disappointment.
The students camped out for two days. The alumni bought up the tickets weeks in advance. They’re starved for good basketball. It wasn’t just that Kansas was back in town for the first time in 11 seasons, though that was certainly a big part of it. It was that Missouri fans finally hoped they had a team they could truly pour their hearts and souls into after a 9-0 start even if they knew on some level the opposition had hardly been stout.
That energy and longing lasted for about two minutes. Mizzou made a couple of layups, Kansas missed a couple and the Tigers led 4-2. At the 18:05 mark, K.J. Adams made a layup to tie it at four. Fifteen seconds later, Grady Dick made a three to put the Jayhawks ahead. Missouri would never threaten again.
Instead of a dream, Mizzou fans got a rude wake-up call from Bill Self and a roster that looked like it was the one trying to prove something.
“That’s about as well as we’ve played for any stretch,” Self said of the opening minutes. “Certainly we played our best game of the season.”
This series tends to bring that out. Players and teams play above their heads. It’s what the rivalry often takes to walk away a winner. To be fair, Self is the only person on either roster who’s ever been a part of this series in this town. He likely spent the week telling his team how far worse Missouri teams have beaten far better Kansas teams. He convinced them they’d have to play their best game of the season and would still be lucky to walk out alive.
It wasn’t fair to expect anybody on Missouri’s roster to understand what this day was going to be like. They have no frame of reference. The only time any of the players or coaches (outside of GA Phil Pressey) have been a part of the Border War was last season’s equally uncompetitive layup line when the Jayhawks humiliated the Tigers 102-65 in Lawrence.
That’s not to say this was about desire or effort. It’s not intended as a shot at Gates’ preparation (he said he thought his team prepared well all week). That wouldn’t be fair to Missouri. There’s a talent gap that’s impossible to deny. Saturday didn’t prove that Missouri didn’t have effort and desire. It just proved that those things alone aren’t nearly enough.
There were brief signs of life. When D’Moi Hodge made a three and Nick Honor lofted an alley-top that Aidan Shaw threw down with the force of all 15,061 in attendance taking out their frustrations, Mizzou was down 40-26. With the reaction from the crowd, you’d have thought the score was reversed.
When DeAndre Gholston made a twisting layup to cut the lead to 15 with 7:35 left in a game that had been over for 20 minutes, they tried again. The screamed and waved their towels and they did everything they could to convince themselves that there was some historic comeback that led to a storybook ending.
"Our crowd was outstanding throughout the game. We just didn’t give them more reason when they were right there on the edge of their seat,” Gates said. “You could clearly hear the excitement but again, timeout, top ten team in America regroups, we didn’t execute how we needed to execute.
Because it seemed like it was supposed to happen. Norm Stewart was in the building. So was Gary Pinkel. Phil Pressey was on the bench. The ghosts of Lee Coward and Thomas Gardner and Corey Tate were certainly going to show up, weren’t they?
They were not. No matter how badly you wanted them to. Kansas’ Kevin McCullar called it an NCAA Tournament atmosphere. He said he and his teammates thrived on it.
“I love these games,” he said.
As Curt Schilling once famously said when the Red Sox finally vanquished the hated Yankees: “Mystique and aura are dancers in a night club. Those are not things we concern ourselves with on the ball field.”
Missouri fans showed up hoping to evoke the days when they turned this rivalry on its head despite being outmanned and under talented. But those were days when the players on the floor had seen it done before, when they knew that they could salvage a season or turn one around with a win in this game. Those days are in the past and Saturday was a jarring reminder of that. Instead, the return of the Border War to Columbia simply became another reminder of how far Missouri is from its basketball glory.
This was no final exam for Dennis Gates. It was just the first test. He has fewer games on the bench at Mizzou than Self has conference titles at Kansas. It was unfair for him and his patchwork team to shoulder the expectations of an entire fanbase and the dreams of generations. Sports are rarely fair and fandom is never logical. You wanted it so badly. That it was unrealistic doesn’t make it hurt any less.
It’s one game of 33. It is no referendum on the season or the coach or the program or the players. If it wasn’t against those guys, you’d be over it by the morning. But it was and you won’t. It will take longer than that. You wanted it so much. It won’t help that it was probably put best by the leader of the enemy when he was asked about returning to Mizzou Arena after more than ten years.
“It was nice. The crowd was very welcoming,” Self joked. “In all honestly you want to be in environments where people care.”
There’s no doubt you cared. You cared with everything you had. It just wasn’t nearly enough.
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