Ten Thoughts for Monday Morning
1) Let's start with what we learned about the basketball team over the weekend. We learned they're not a top ten team in the country. We learned that when a top ten team plays well and Missouri plays poorly, the result is a blowout. They're neither as good as they looked playing the 362nd best schedule in the country or as bad as they looked on Saturday against Kansas. That shouldn't really be something we learned. That should be something we knew. Saturday showed us both the good and bad of scheduling the way Missouri did in the first month of the season.
The good: That game had more juice with Missouri 9-0 than it would have if Missouri was 7-2 even if the 7-2 had been accomplished against a better schedule. Those who pay close attention knew the 9-0 was inflated because of the schedule. But those who pay attention to those things are always going to watch and always going to be there. The fans this team needs to win over are the casual fans. And you get those fans with wins, regardless of who they're against. More casual fans were paying attention on Saturday because Missouri was 9-0 than if it hadn't been.
The bad: It gave all of us a false sense of hope. This team isn't ready to compete with the likes of Kansas yet. That's not an insult and it shouldn't even be a surprise. Missouri was 12-21 last year. It brought back two guys who played significant minutes on that team. Kobe Brown is probably this team's best player. Can he be the best player on an NCAA Tournament caliber team? I think that's debatable. He disappears against good competition too often. Other than those two players, Nick Honor was the only guy who had played consistently against high major competition. The rest of the roster still has to show it can. Yes, Noah Carter put up big numbers and has been good for the first month of the season. Same with D'Moi Hodge. But nothing either one has done has shown they can play well against an SEC schedule. For those who were convinced that the first month showed "these guys can play at this level" it didn't. What Hodge and Carter (and really the rest of the team) did in the first month of the season showed that Missouri would be a very good mid- to low-major team. It has not yet shown it can be a good high-major team. It's possible it still can be, but we don't know that yet.
2) But if we're being honest, the bar for this team was never whether it could beat Kansas. It really isn't whether it can beat Illinois, Kentucky or Arkansas either. Not yet. The bar for this team is can it beat South Carolina, Georgia, Ole Miss, Texas A&M, etc. The top of the SEC is really, really good. Then there's a big middle to bottom of the league. The goal for Mizzou in Dennis Gates' first season needs to be to get in the top half of that group. If the Tigers can do that, they'll finish somewhere around 9th in the SEC and probably be an NIT team. If they can be a couple games better, they're entering the bubble conversation. That should always have been the realistic target for this team in my opinion. We just might have let the bad schedule and the emotions of playing Kansas again cloud our judgment for a minute.
3) The rest of December and the beginning of January hold a game Missouri needs to win and three bonus games.
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