Rush The Court

I did not grow up in Missouri. I am not a longtime Missouri sports fan or a Missouri, well, anything. In fact, my parents got married and lived in Kansas for the first half of the 1980s. Both Mom and Dad remember fondly watching the likes of Rolando Blackman, Danny Manning, Mark Turgeon, Antoine Carr and Xavier McDaniel bring color to their old black-and-white TV. Eventually, the two of them pulled some money together and moved to Houston back in 1985. That’s where I grew up and my favorite thing to do as a kid was watch Big 12 basketball. I was familiar enough with Missouri basketball but I didn’t become a Mizzou fan until it was time to look for a college. Missouri was the first school I applied to and got into four years ago. It didn’t hurt that the basketball team looked pretty good too.

From that point, I was all in. When Mizzou played its last home game against Kansas in 2012, my emotions were predictable. I had no problem trolling Mom and Dad about how Mizzou were heroes and Kansas were zeros on that particular night. The last Border War game later that season was the most emotionally draining game I’ve ever experienced. The Tigers built a 19-point lead — at Allen Fieldhouse — only to watch it melt away with yet another devastating loss in the Phog. My voice was gone at halftime. My legs were tired from running around the living room. I was spent. The subsequent NCAA Tournament loss as a #2 seed to Norfolk State was a humiliating way to end a memorable regular season, but as we look back now, it was also the beginning of an era of shame for a once-proud basketball program.

The season after that should have been a redemptive one. The team had a healthy mix of transfers and experienced holdovers from the Mike Anderson era. This included Alex Oriakhi, a UConn transfer who eventually became a late second-round pick in 2013, and Phil Pressey, a diminutive and talented point guard who would spend the better part of the next three seasons playing in the NBA. It wasn’t. Six players scored in double figures but the Tigers underachieved their way to a #8 seed in the NCAA Tournament, bowing out to Colorado State in the Round of 64. In 2013-14, the Tigers continued to regress by earning an NIT bid. A month after the season ended, Frank Haith texted then-Mizzou athletic director Mike Alden by saying he was leaving to take the Tulsa job.

If you’re a Missouri basketball fan, one thing you know is that the program often has an opportunity to be great but fails to capitalize. We could start with losing to a #15 seed in the NCAA Tournament, but there’s so much more to it than that. For example, no Power 5 team has made the NCAA Tournament more times (25) without playing in a Final Four. Or, there would have been a different national champion back in 1995 had the Tigers’ defense not allowed Tyus Edney to go the length of the floor in 4.8 seconds for a game-winning UCLA layup. The coaching hires too have been hit-and-miss. The choice to replace the legendary Norm Stewart in 1999 was Quin Snyder, a Duke assistant who took the Tigers to the NCAA Tournament four straight years (including an Elite Eight) before falling off badly in his last three. Alden then nailed the Mike Anderson hire, the university’s first-ever black permanent head coach, in 2006. It was understandable that he left town for Arkansas in 2011, a place where he had spent 17 years as an assistant under Nolan Richardson. His replacement, Haith, however, put together three progressively worse years before bailing out in 2014.

The next hire, Kim Anderson, a coach whom the administration didn’t think was ready to replace the legendary Norm Stewart in 1999, moved east to Columbia after leading Central Missouri to a Division II National Championship. Anderson is Mizzou. A True Son in every sense of the phrase. He grew up in Sedalia, Missouri, which is a little more than an hour away from the Columbia campus. He became an all-Big Eight selection and second-round NBA Draft pick because of Stewart. He became an assistant coach because of Stewart. He became the head coach of his alma mater because of Stewart. But when he took the job on April 28, 2014, it didn’t resemble that which Stewart had constructed through his 634 wins over 32 years.

Anderson arrived in Columbia unaware that the NCAA had made a verbal inquiry into possible violations that occurred under Haith’s watch. On top of that oversight, Anderson received a roster devoid of high-major talent. In an effort to promote acceptable team behavior, Anderson suspended seven players (including all five freshmen) at some point last season. A 9-23 season and last-place finish in the SEC was the result. In the offseason, Anderson lost two of his top three scorers (Johnathan Williams III and Montaque Gill-Caesar) to transfer. Six players who received regular minutes last season returned. Halfway through his second season, inconsistent play has made it difficult to discern if improvements are being made.

When the Tigers opened the season with a blowout victory over Wofford, it appeared as if Mizzou was trending up. A subsequent ugly 24-point loss to Kansas State dispelled that notion. When Missouri dispatched Auburn last week by 15 points in Columbia, it looked like the Tigers were no longer playing the role of SEC pushover. Then Arkansas, a team that came into this week’s game with an identical 8-7 record, torched the Tigers by 33 points. Anderson currently sits at 17-31 overall and has yet to win a true road game. Sixteen of those wins have come within the friendly confines of Mizzou Arena and the other came against Division II Chaminade at last year’s Maui Invitational.

Missouri self-imposed SEC and other postseason tournament bans for this season, but what does it matter? The Tigers weren’t going anywhere of consequence anyway. The toll all of the change has taken on the fan base is palpable. Mizzou Arena, an 11-year-old facility that can house a capacity of 15,061 people, has seen attendance numbers drop dramatically from an average of 13,805 fans in Haith’s second season to a paltry 6,088 fans so far this year. This season is lost, but next season is shaping up as the most important of Anderson’s coaching career. Whether the 60-year old who bleeds black and gold is the long-term answer for a program that has experienced so much disappointment over its history remains to be seen. The only certainty is that, given Mizzou’s history, the ride into the future is unlikely to be a smooth one.