Missouri lost 80-61 to Tennessee on Tuesday night.
Nineteen points? They lost by 19 God damn points?
I don’t think you can say God damn in a column.
It doesn’t matter. Nobody’s reading anyway.
(If you’re offended, go watch Major League. I was trying to do a bit here).
I jest because I’m out of words. Mizzou lost for the 18th time this season. There was nothing particularly remarkable about it. Tennessee was ranked 17th in the country led by a speedy stable of guards which Missouri is not particularly equipped to keep from driving at will. On the other end, teams force Missouri to make outside shots and Missouri makes fewer outside shots than nearly any team in the country. The Tigers have lost 12 games by double digits and ten by at least 17 points. Incidentally, ten is also the number of games Missouri has won.
I came to Mizzou Arena expecting to see a blowout and I saw a blowout. It wasn’t quite the 37-point humiliation at Kansas or the 87-43 excoriation at Arkansas in which the Razorbacks could have gone scoreless in the second half and won by six, but it was another lopsided loss in a season full of them that was decided by the under 12 timeout if we’re being nice and at the opening tip if we aren’t.
I was there because I get paid to be. Missouri announced that 7253 others that actually paid were there. I’m not sure that’s an honest account, but I don’t much care at this point. The point is that Mizzou Arena had all the atmosphere of a Knights of Columbus pancake feed where the food cost more and wasn’t as good. And that, really, is the issue.
I could have written the first seven paragraphs of this column before the game started. Anyone expecting anything different hasn’t been paying attention. And Mizzou fans aren’t paying attention in increasing numbers. Prior to the game, the Tiger starters walked down the stairs in the student section as they were introduced. They had to have the band members come over to the aisle so it looked like there were some actual students in the building by tip time.
Earlier on Tuesday I talked to a friend who I think can accurately be described as a die-hard Missouri basketball fan. Or at least he could have been at one time. He used to tell me things about who Missouri was recruiting. When I mentioned I was going to the game he asked who they were playing. He didn’t even know there was a game. The conversation wasn't unique.
The apathy isn’t new. I’m not breaking news to anybody that’s reading this. Just to prove the point, if you’ve gotten this far, post “I made it to paragraph ten” on our message board. The first ten to do so will get a free month. But the apathy's got to be the largest factor in the equation that Desiree Reed-Francois is going to have to solve in about three weeks.
The record is dreadful, but maybe you could explain that with the almost entirely new roster and some close losses that were one play from going the other way.
“It’s areas where we could still grow but you can also see a lot of growth throughout the season,” Javon Pickett, the lone senior on the team, said. "No excuse, we’re so many games in but we got like a new team so everybody got to get used to how coach want us to do.
“They give us everything we need to do to win. That’s just us on as players we got to go out there and compete.”
But you can’t explain away all the empty gold seats that serve as little more than an echo board for the mind-splittingly loud public address announcements and timeout entertainment to rattle through the 15,000 seat building that hasn’t come anywhere close to needing to be that big this season. Losing is one thing. Apathy is entirely another.
Cuonzo Martin might have done enough in his first four seasons to survive the former. I’m far less sure he’s done enough to survive the latter. And make no mistake, this fanbase is full-on apathetic. At the first TV timeout, the game thread on our message board had one reply. ONE. On a forum populated by the most die-hard Mizzou sports fans on the planet.
I spoke with Reed-Francois after the game and asked what she could say about Martin’s future beyond the SEC Tournament that starts in 15 days.
“As we do with all of our head coaches, we will meet at the end of the season and go from there,” she said.
Hardly a revelation. I didn’t expect an answer beyond that. But it was time for the question to be asked and it was. The answer doesn’t matter now. It will in a little more than two weeks.
Decision day looms. Either way, Reed-Francois will need to be prepared with an explanation. If Martin is out as the Tigers’ coach after five seasons, she’ll need to lay out her plan to revive a program that will soon be 12 full years removed from its last NCAA Tournament win and ten seasons past the last time it had any sort of a legitimate chance at a conference title. She’ll have to have a path forward for a program that came into the SEC expected to be one of the conference’s better ones and now is 51 games under .500 in league play over a decade.
If Martin comes back, her explanation will need to be even more thorough. Because the fans are ready for change. Yes, they’re posting it on our message board and tweeting it daily. But far more importantly, they’re showing it by staying home. Mizzou basketball games aren’t events. They’re obligations. And more and more people are opting out. Some want to believe the decision has already been made and maybe on some level it has. But if there’s still a sliver of opportunity for Martin to save his job and he does it, the Tigers’ first-year athletic director is going to have a chance to display her crisis management expertise.
Martin believes the effort and desire from his team is still there.
“With rest I think they’ll be fine,” he said, a nod to Mizzou playing its fourth game in seven days. “They’re fine. I don’t worry about that part.”
If Martin is worried about anything beyond Saturday’s game at LSU, he isn’t showing it. That’s not his nature. He has said before if Missouri fired him, he would thank his bosses for the opportunity and disappear. That’s never really been a threat before. It is now.
Whatever the verdict is, we’ll know within three weeks. Thank God. I haven’t had anything interesting to say about this season in a month.
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