Commentary: Mission accomplished, another awaits
Desiree Reed-Francois was an associate athletic director at Tennessee. Dennis Gates was in his second year as an assistant coach at the University of Nevada. It was March of 2010. No player on Missouri's current basketball roster was older than 11.
Missouri’s head basketball coach was Mike Anderson. Led in scoring by sophomores Kim English, Marcus Denmon and Laurence Bowers, the Tigers won 23 games. The final one was an 86-78 win over Clemson at HSBC Arena in Buffalo, NY. That was a first-round (technically second-round) NCAA Tournament game.
Missouri hasn’t won one since.
Anderson has since been hired and fired at Arkansas and St. John’s. English is in his second season as the head coach at George Mason. Bowers is in his first year back in Columbia as the executive director of Every True Tiger Foundation, Mizzou’s name, image and likeness collective. It’s not that NIL didn’t exist when Missouri last won a tournament game. It’s that the guy running the entire collective was in his first year as a college starter.
For those counting—and I am—it’s been 4,742 days. By the time the Tigers tip off against Utah State at 12:40 Central time (10:40 a.m. in Sacramento), that number will be 4,746.
Make no mistake, Missouri is in this tournament to win, not just one game, but as many as it can.
“Thankful for the opportunity,” Gates said. “These are special memories. I’m glad that our players get to experience this, but also we have a job to do.
“We’ve talked about it weekly as one of our goals. But it’s not one of our goals just to be in the NCAA Tournament.”
Missouri—and the other 67 teams still playing in college basketball—want to extend the dance as long as possible. But regardless of the result on Thursday afternoon, this season warrants at least a moment after Selection Sunday to appreciate that the Tigers are one of those 68 teams.
It’s not just that it’s been 13 years. It’s been everything that happened in those 13 years. The days of Norm Stewart, and even Quin Snyder’s early days, are long gone. The Tigers used to be a regular in this event. In the 38 seasons between 1976 and 2013, Missouri went to 25 NCAA Tournaments. They made the Big Dance almost twice as often as they didn’t. Those nearly four decades featured three separate five-year stretches in which the Tigers made the tournament every year. It became expected. It’s what they did.
Until it wasn’t.
Since the 2013 tournament in which a loss to Colorado State marked the third consecutive year Missouri was one and done, the Tigers went to only two NCAA Tournaments before this one. They missed it six times and it was canceled once, but they were missing it anyway. Missouri didn’t win in either of those appearances.
But it wasn’t just that they weren’t there. The Tigers rarely had any chance. In 2013-14, Missouri won 23 games and was on the wrong side of the bubble. The next six seasons in which the Tigers missed the tournament, they had a combined record of 69-122. They weren’t just down. They were as far down as they’d been since before Stewart came back from Northern Iowa.
There wasn’t a whole lot of reason to expect this team was going to be the one to bring hope back to the Missouri fan base. Gates took over a program that had won 12 games. He turned over virtually the entire roster. Kobe Brown, Ronnie DeGray and Kaleb Brown are the only three players on the team who had ever played at Missouri before. DeGray and Kaleb logged a combined 254 minutes this season.
Besides Kobe, only Nick Honor had ever played a game at a high-major basketball school before. He spent two years at Clemson before transferring to Missouri. The rest of the roster was, as Gates reportedly said mockingly in celebration in the tunnel after beating Tennessee in the SEC Tournament on Friday, “a bunch of mid-major guys.” And, oh, by the way, the most celebrated of those mid-major guys—Missouri State transfer Isiaih Mosley—has played in just 14 games and wasn’t at the Selection Sunday gathering.
But return hope these Tigers have. They won 24 games, doubling last years total and exceeding the number of games Missouri has won in any season since 2012. They beat Illinois, Kentucky, Arkansas and Tennessee twice. They secured the school’s highest SEC finish in a decade in the conference and appeared in the conference tournament semifinals for the first time.
It is the team that the SEC thought it was getting when Mizzou joined the league, fresh off a 30-win season in which it won the Big 12 Tournament and earned a two-seed in the NCAA Tournament. When I asked Reed-Francois about this team restoring hope to the fanbase, she flashed back to a conversation with then SEC commissioner Mike Slive.
“I remember in 2011 or 12, Commissioner Slive, we were teaching a law school class at Tennessee and I remember asking, ‘why Mizzou?’ she said. “He said three things really: Kansas City and St. Louis markets, AAU institution, but he was like ‘They are going to elevate men’s basketball and volleyball in this conference.’ I knew about the tradition of Mizzou basketball coming in.”
She pauses. The part she doesn’t have to say is that the tradition didn’t come with Missouri to the SEC. Mizzou athletics has had some moments in this conference, but none of them have really been on the basketball court. Mizzou’s women’s program has been more successful, thanks to four years of Sophie Cunningham. The Tigers had been fodder for the rest of the conference’s teams that had followed Slive’s directive to hire better coaches and invest in a sport that hadn’t always been top of mind in the football and even baseball-driven South.
But this year’s team, led by a first year coach that was met with skepticism when Reed-Francois hired him, has rustled the memories of the tradition of which Gates so often speaks.
“Whenever you’re doing things that’s traditionally been done, you respect those that came before you even more,” Gates said. “It’s not easy to do the things we’ve done.”
The hundreds of fans packing into Mizzou Arena, showering the Tigers with multiple ovations in the hour leading up to the announcement of the NCAA Tournament field appreciate it. Maybe more than they used to. They know now it’s not a given. They know, as Gates said, it’s not easy. And they wanted him and his players to know what they’ve done has not gone unnoticed.
“It just warms my heart to see. I’m so excited,” her voice catching with emotion. “Throughout this season, you could feel it. It’s just special. I’m just really thankful that our fans have embraced this team. They’re starting to believe.”
Now, Gates hopes to give them one more reason.
“These guys are gonna have these memories in their memory banks stored for a lifetime,” he said. “Hopefully in that lifetime, we have more memories to add.”
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“If your insurance costs a leg and an arm, call James Carlton State Farm.”
