Tigers need to make games like Saturday the norm
You know you’re thinking it. It’s okay to admit it. Why can’t every game be Rally for Rhyan?
“Me and Mitch (Smith) were kind of telling guys since we’ve been here for all these games, this isn’t a game we’re going to lose,” Reed Nikko said. “These aren’t games we lose. This means way more than your stat line, than our last game.”
Missouri won the annual fundraiser for pediatric cancer again on Saturday, beating Arkansas 83-79 in overtime this time around (and, oh, by the way, raised somewhere in the neighborhood of $80,000). They did it in part thanks to a double-double from Nikko and 11 rebounds from Arkansas native Mitchell Smith along with a career-high 24 points from Xavier Pinson and a dash of Tray Jackson’s athleticism.
The Razorbacks are having a much better season than the Tigers, who are now 11-12, 3-7 in the SEC and going nowhere meaningful even with this win. But on this day, that didn’t matter. It never does when the Tigers’ and their fans come together to support Rhyan Loos, who was diagnosed with neuroblastoma, a form of pediatric cancer, as a kindergartner in the fall of 2015.
The first Rally for Rhyan game was played on February 13th, 2016 against Tennessee. The Tigers were 8-16 and had lost nine consecutive games. They beat the Volunteers 75-64. The next February, a Missouri team that would finish 8-24 beat Arkansas 83-78 in the second game. Cuonzo Martin has beaten Mississippi State, Vanderbilt and now Arkansas in his three years of this game.
The Tigers’ combined record in non-Rally for Rhyan games over the last five seasons is 59-87. In the five Rally for Rhyan games, all Mizzou wins, the opponents they’ve beaten came into the night a combined 66-40.
“Since I’ve been a freshman, we weren’t that good and we didn’t lose that game,” Mitchell Smith said. “I don’t know, something just comes over this arena when we play this game and it’s magical. We’re doing it for a little girl, all the little kids out there that’s going through cancer.”
“It was bigger than just a basketball game,” Xavier Pinson said. “Mr. Loos and Rhyan, it was mainly for those two people, the whole Rhyan Loos family. It was mainly for her.”
There’s a common denominator in these games. Sure, it’s Rhyan Loos and the fact that she has inspired a fanbase to look at more than wins and losses and taught a generation of Missouri basketball fans what it means to truly battle. But the five games have drawn an average of 11,912 fans to Mizzou Arena. The lowest total was 10,436 in the first game with Missouri in the dregs of a second consecutive dreadful season under Kim Anderson. The 2018 contest was a sellout in Martin’s first year. Saturday saw a season-high 11,439 in attendance.
The people showed up. And they were loud. When Tray Jackson blocked a shot on one end, ran the floor and slammed home a Xavier Pinson miss on the other, you would have been forgiven for thinking this was a team that was actually playing a game that was important to its season. Mizzou Arena was legitimately loud. It got that way again down the stretch of regulation and as the Tigers ran out to a seven-point lead halfway through overtime.
“The crowd gave us a lot of added intensity,” Jackson said. “They help us a lot.”
“It would be great if we could get crowds like that every night,” Nikko said. “It’s huge for us when we can play off our crowd energy, especially in a game like this where we had a lot of big plays.”
The crowd—and the noise it produced—stood out because it’s now the exception at Mizzou home games. Minus the Porter-mania driven season of 2017-18, Tiger fans haven’t much shown up the last few years. There are plenty of reasons why. The Tigers have played in one NCAA Tournament in the last seven seasons. There are rarely big games played here. It’s a classic chicken or the egg argument. Does the team play well because the fans show up or do fans show up because the team is already playing well? Depends on who you ask.
“I think the fans jump on board because of the game, but I think our fans, it has to be a way of life,” Cuonzo Martin said. “This is Mizzou basketball. It’s a great tradition, great history. You’re in the Show-Me State. So I think our fans have to take more pride just to be a part of the game, to be a part of it. And then you create an atmosphere like this every night.”
“We gotta win games,” Mitchell Smith said. “We gotta win games that we’re supposed to win. People are not gonna come see losers. We gotta win games."
The answer, obviously, is that it’s both. Sure, a team is going to play better in front of a packed arena. Opponents are likely to play a little worse. Even officials tend to be influenced by raucous home crowds (Missouri did shoot 44 free throws on Saturday, but to be fair, the officials seemed to be blowing their whistle on every possession because Arkansas shot 39 itself).
But the team’s got to give fans a reason to go, too. Missouri hasn’t done that for a long time. Not consistently anyway. Once a year, they ask fans to show up and help a courageous little girl and her family fight a hideous disease and maybe help assure that some other set of parents don’t have to be told their kindergartner has no better than a 40% chance to make it to the first grade. And that’s great. And of course it’s more important than basketball. But it’s okay to think basketball is important too. It used to be really important around here. Days like Saturday show it can be again. Maybe even when it’s just a regular basketball game.
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