The end has arrived
NASHVILLE—The end came relatively quietly and without suspense. There was no frantic comeback, no last-second hopes. There was simply a technical-riddled slow march to the end in the second half of Missouri’s 86-74 loss to Ole Miss.
With it, the Tigers finished the season 8-24 and bowed out of the SEC Tournament, ending the three-year head coaching career of Kim Anderson.
“The end of the season’s always hard because you never want to prepare your speech for the end of the season,” Anderson said. “But now, not only that, you’re preparing for the end of your career.
“It was an emotional game. It’s been an emotional week.”
The only drama in this one was whether the chippiness of the second half would boil over at some point. The suddenly expletive-happy Anderson picked up a technical foul with 13:47 to play for comparing an official’s call to a particular kind of bovine excrement. Just 2:25 later, senior Russell Woods exited his final college game after picking up his fourth personal foul and then getting T’d up for protesting too much.
There was a flagrant foul on Jordan Geist (the second in as many nights) and a double foul called when Terrence Phillips made little effort to avoid an Ole Miss player who was looking the other way and hit the floor after a collision. Missouri got within ten after the break, but never closer. All in all, it was a long, painful second half…perhaps a fitting way to conclude the last three seasons of Missouri basketball.
“We just went down fighting and that’s how we’ve been all year,” Phillips said. “This is just a team that never gives up no matter how much we’re down. We could be down 30 or 40 and we just never give up. Fouls are just the way it’s going to go with the officials, but at the end of the day, we just kept fighting for this man right here.”
“We always fight. Our efforts always there,” Kevin Puryear said. “It’s his last game and of course we’re sad about it. We’ve just got to scratch and claw and do everything we can to get back in the game.”
“I saw a game that got a little bit physical, a little bit rough. We made some fouls that weren’t very smart,” Anderson said. “These guys have always played hard. They probably haven’t always played smart.”
Anderson finishes his career 27-68, a .284 winning percentage. Against SEC competition, the Tigers were 9-48 including post-season tournament games. The end has been certain since Sunday and a foregone conclusion for much longer. Anderson was, if not defiant, at least somewhat defensive of his tenure in his final post-game press conference.
“I certainly hope that whoever the coach is that we have provided a little bit of a building block for them or whatever,” Anderson said. “I maintain when I was hired I was pretty much asked to kind of stabilize this program. It took a while. Obviously it took too long. But I'm proud of what we've done. I know there's a lot of people out there that aren't. But there's no one out there that's sat in my shoes for the last three years and no one out there knows the challenges that we had. You guys don't know. Nobody knows it but me. And I'm not trying to be a martyr or anything like that, but I think when I walk out of here, when I leave, which will be tomorrow, I think we did some good things. But obviously we didn't win enough games and we didn't generate enough money. And when you don't do that in college athletics, you don't get to do your job. And I'm not bitter. I certainly understand that. I understand it. If you were to ask me when did you know you were gonna get fired, I would have said probably the first day I took the job. Because there was a lot of challenges that had to be met. We met them and we did a pretty good job. We just didn't win enough games."
His players praised him, as they always have. They had won one for him in Nashville, but simply regressed to the mean—that of a thrice last place SEC team—on Thursday night.
“He’s proud of us and happy that he had the chance to live out his dream and coach us,” Puryear said of Anderson’s post-game message. “Of course it was emotional. We have a great deal of love for him. He always has and always will have our best interests…It’s never easy saying goodbye.”
“I just told them how much I enjoyed coaching them, how proud I was of them. We didn’t win enough games. And obviously when that happens the coach gets asked to take his ball and go home. And that’s what happened.”
The Tigers will leave Nashville on Friday morning. Anderson has said he wants to coach again. His assistant coaches will be paid for the next three months and look for other employment. The players? It remains to be seen how many will be back in Columbia when the next school year begins.
“I wish I could tell you what the future holds, but unfortunately I can’t,” Puryear said. “I think we can do some good things if everyone sticks together. I’m confident that we will stick together.”
“I think Coach A’s leaving this program in great shape with some great guys,” Phillips said. “From the start of the season we thought we were really going to have a really great year and we just didn’t.
“Anybody that watched us this year knows that we’re right there.”
Director of Athletics Jim Sterk was in Nashville for both games. He, too, will return to Columbia, albeit likely quite briefly. Sterk now is tasked with finding the 19th head basketball coach in Missouri history. The search is now the sole focus of the Tiger basketball program.
