The first time Jordan Geist played at Georgia, he nearly started a riot. In January 2017, Geist tried to snatch the ball out of Yante Maten’s hands as the halftime buzzer sounded. That angered Maten, and their face-off morphed into a skirmish that included a coach fight — Missouri assistant Steve Shields vs. Georgia assistant Kent Davison — before everyone was herded into their locker rooms.
That two old codgers in suits had to be restrained from swinging at each other was a surprise, but the source of the conflict was not. Geist was not playing for Missouri because he was a skilled basketball player. He left junior college to join a program whose coach — Kim Anderson — had barely survived his second season and was unlikely to survive a third. Anderson got Geist because few others were interested in a 6-foot-2 guard who was average in most ways. He was remarkable only as an agitator, and, as far as I could tell, Geist’s willingness to antagonize a 6-8, 240-pound hulk like Maten was the reason he was getting minutes on a team without much fight. It turned out to be misguided aggression, because the fracas motivated a sleepy Georgia team to come back from a halftime deficit and hand Missouri its 27th straight road loss.
When Anderson got the ax late in that season and Cuonzo Martin brought in a top-five recruiting class, I thought Geist might quietly find a home in the Ohio Valley Conference to make room for the reclassifying Jontay Porter. What role was there for a designated pain-in-the-ass on a team with actual talent?
