Ten Thoughts for Monday Morning

Many of you are not going to want to read all of this. I don't think that's the best way to tease a story, but I'm just being up front with you. There's going to be a lot of Chiefs stuff and Super Bowl stuff in here and some of you don't care about that but you can't please everybody all the time so hopefully some will enjoy it. Before that, though, you guys are here for the Mizzou stuff so let's do some of that.

1) Missouri basketball had the week we should expect this team to have. Everybody was ready to give up and they came back from a 20 point deficit with 13 minutes to play to beat Georgia and there was just a glimmer of hope and belief and everybody thought "You know, I know they're not going to the NCAA Tournament, but maybe they found a little something and there are some winnable games coming up and maybe they can string a few together and at least make things fun for a while." And then they more or less no-showed at South Carolina and got beat by 22 and it didn't even feel that close. That's just what this team is. It's inconsistent. Missouri is a game under .500 right now. I would expect they'll finish the year somewhere between a couple games under that mark and a couple games over it. On their best nights, they can do things like beat Florida. On their worst, they can get blown out by anyone on the schedule and can lose to Charleston Southern. Who knows what you're going to see on any given day?

2) The injuries can't be ignored but also shouldn't be put in a class with those from the last two years. The best player in America got hurt and contributed nothing in year one and Cuonzo Martin did one hell of a coaching job with his first team. Then the best player on the team and a probable all-SEC player got hurt two weeks before the season started and torpedoed year two and the roster wasn't as talented as it was the year before so the record dipped. Jeremiah Tilmon is important to this team, but even when he was in the lineup he hadn't made the leap everyone expected and Missouri wasn't pointed in the direction of the NCAA Tournament even with him. Mark Smith is important to this team, but he was pretty much the same player he was last year and Missouri wasn't pointed in the NCAA Tournament even with him. In other words, the injuries are maybe the difference between 13 wins and 17 wins. Does it matter? Not really. The goal this season was always the NCAA Tournament and even at full health this Missouri team has never looked like one that was good enough to get there. My point is basically whenever we get to the point where it's time to assess Martin's future and how long it should last (we aren't there yet) the injuries this season shouldn't really be much of a factor in that discussion. The first couple of seasons, yes, you have to look at the results through the lens of the coach being hamstrung. This year, not so much.

3) There's really nothing else to say about this season.

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