It’s Monday morning, so it’s time for me to let you all know what’s been on my mind the past week.
This week, it’s mostly a spot for me to get out my basketball thoughts I’ve been holding back on since Thursday.
Basketball Thoughts
1. Let’s talk about the season now that there’s been a few days to calm down.
We’ve made it through another sports season, and though it didn’t end well, it’s still a good time to try to bring some perspective and reminisce about the year a bit.
Was it a disappointing end to the season?
Definitely. No question about it.
With the talent and ability the Tigers showed through late January and through February, losing to Drake and letting the Bulldogs dictate exactly what they wanted to do throughout was abhorrent.
I’m not going to go back to before the season for what people were saying would make for a successful basketball season. Obviously coming off last year, just winning a few conference games would have been a success.
This team showed early on that they were better than last season, though that first game against Memphis was scarily reminiscent of issues from the 2023-24 team.
The next handful of games weren’t too telling. There’s only so much to learn against cupcakes, though showing the ability to put up 100 multiple times was still impressive.
Cal didn’t end up being a good team (14-19 overall), but that win showed a resiliency that the Tigers had to show people they were capable of.
Then came the Border War and a win that gave all the students in attendance a memory they will remember forever singing Mr. Brightside on the floor with the players to celebrate.
And I remember asking after that game, “What do the Tigers still need to do to make this season successful?”
A number of the responses still had some amount of “Win a conference game or two” to them, we hadn’t gotten to that point yet so it makes sense for that to still be necessary.
But I also remember a few specific ones. “They beat the Beakers, whatever else happens, it’s been successful.”
The Tigers won the border war, they beat top-5 Florida on their home court, they put up 110 on a top-5 Alabama team. They became the first team to ever go from winless in conference play one year to over-.500 in conference play the next.
Obviously the end of the year was rough, I’m not making excuses for the way it ended. But the first 26 games still happened, they’re still real. Just because the final eight didn’t go the way people wanted/expected doesn’t mean those first 26 no longer exist.
2. Which brings me to addressing the online talk about Dennis Gates.
Nobody serious is talking about Gates being shown the door, and neither should you guys.
Again, the way the season ended sucked. Was Gates’ game plan against Drake really bad? Ya, I think it was.
I didn’t like adjusting the starting lineup to force a moment or only playing Josh Gray six minutes against a team that didn’t have a player less than a head shorter than him. I didn’t agree with not posting up Mark Mitchell if you’re going to use him as your de facto big.
But it’s also not Gates’ fault that Caleb Grill missed multiple open 3s or that Ant Robinson essentially became a liability handling the ball at one of the most important parts of the season.
There are aspects to criticize for sure, but to say Gates hasn’t done a great job in two of his three years (and obviously an awful job in the other one when he was missing the future SEC sixth-man of the year and an All-American guard) is nonsense.
Cuonzo Martin won 20 games once and went over .500 one time out of five years. Kim Anderson won double-digit games once in three years.
Out of the past 10 seasons of Tiger basketball, Gates has the two best seasons in just three opportunities.
He took the Tigers to the Round of 32 for the first time in a decade. Is that good enough? Not if your goal is championships as Gates keeps telling us in the hype video before every game, but considering he just finished
But for a coach in his sixth year at the helm of any program and third in major college basketball, that’s already a pretty good resume.
And he showed through the portal and high school class this year that he is a good recruiter, which raises the long-term floor.
We'll see if he's able to do it again through the transfer portal, which opens up today. Keeping his own players is going to be the first key and right now, it seems like those grumblings we discussed from T.O. Barrett and Peyton Marshall have quieted.
I still wouldn't be surprised if Aidan Shaw entered his name in the portal in the next couple of days, but Gates has convinced him to stay around a couple of times already, if he's really convinced Shaw could play an important role as a senior, I don't doubt his salesmanship.
From what I've heard, I'm not worried about any other player on the roster hitting the portal at this point, including Annor Boateng.
So the sales pitch seems to be working. Things can change fast during portal season, but right now, it seems like the strong majority, if not all of the available players will be back for next season.
3. So let’s take a look at how some historic coaches did in their first six years at the top of any program.
- Mike Krzyzewski had a record of 90-72 (55.6 percent) in his first six years at Army and Duke. He was also 40-47 (46 percent) in his first three years at Duke.
- Jim Calhoun was 81-69 (54 percent) in his first six years at Northeastern and 47-46 (50.5 percent) in his first three years at UConn.
- Even everyone’s favorite Bill Self was 97-76 (56.1 percent) in his first six years at Oral Roberts and Tulsa. He was pretty immediately successful at Illinois and kansas though.
- And Norm Stewart was 98-59 (60.5 percent) in his first six years at Mizzou.
Gates is 105-86 (55 percent) overall in his first six seasons across both Cleveland State and Mizzou.
A lot of coaches take a few years to really get going. Krzyzewski won 20 games in Year 2 at Army, then didn’t again until Year 9 overall, which was Year 4 at Duke. Then he did for 11 consecutive years.
Calhoun didn’t win 20 games until Year 9 overall, but then he did in nine of the next 12 years.
Stewart didn’t win 20 games until Year 5 and it took a while to get a run of them going, but he did 13 of the final 20 years of his career with another two years of 19 and a year of 18 in there.
In the cases of Stewart and Calhoun, teams were playing less games early on, I get that, so let’s talk win percentage.
Gates has had two seasons with a win percentage above .700 and two more above .640.
Stewart took till Year 9 to have four seasons above .640 with two above .700. Calhoun took until Year 10 to hit those marks. Krzyzewski took until Year 10, even Self took until Year 7 to hit those marks.
Gates is ahead of them all in hitting consistent successful seasons early in his career. But obviously that’s marred by the 2023-24 season.
And if you want to talk tournament success, Gates has made the tournament three times in six seasons, including winning a conference tournament at Cleveland State to make it in 2020-21.
He’s been knocked out in the first round twice and made the second round once.
Krzyzewski didn’t make the tournament a third time until Year 11 and got bounced in his first game and the second round in his first two trips, then made the Final Four in the third.
Calhoun didn’t make the tournament a third time until year 12, but let’s give him a chance and look at his time at UConn, where he didn’t make it until Year 4. He was 2-5 in his first five tournaments, with the two wins coming in play-in first-round games before the tournament expanded to 64.
Self didn’t make the tournament for a third time until Year 8. He made the second round, the Sweet 16 and the Elite 8 in his first three trips.
So the tournament success isn't really on Gates' side in a lot of these comparisons, but those other coaches also had a lot more experience to develop their systems before they even got there.
This isn't the case for every great coach of course. There are a number of them who had immediate success. Roy Williams was successful from Year 1, as was Jim Boeheim. John Calipari started his string of great success in Year 3.
I’m not saying Gates is on track to be a hall of famer or saying he’s going to become Krzyzewski if you just give him a chance. But he’s had an overall pretty successful start to his head coaching career and it takes a little longer than people are usually willing to allow nowadays for a lot of coaches to really find their footing.
4. This one isn’t Mizzou specific, just a tournament thought that I can’t get out of my head.
As has been talked about in a couple of threads, the NIL and transfer portal era seems to have limited the amount of upsets as mid-major teams get drained of talent year-over-year and the best players head to major-conference teams.
And fewer upsets likely means better, more-talented overall basketball once we get into the second weekend and the final four. You are much less likely to see a 30-point blowout in the Sweet 16 if there isn’t a 13 seed making it that far.
But I’m also much less compelled by the tournament without those upsets.
It feels similar to the argument between watching the NFL and college football or the NBA and college basketball.
Want to watch the best overall basketball you can? Watch the NBA.
But is it the most compelling or fun to watch? Not to me.
Same with football. The best football, obviously, is being played in the NFL. But college footbal is more fun to watch and often has a lot more fun stories to follow.
And for the tournament specifically, that's because of the cinderellas. Who wants to see a Final Four with all No. 1 seeds? I'm pretty sure that's only happened in 2008 and it led to high-quality basketball. But the point of the tournament, to me at least, is all the small teams finally have a chance to match up with the big boys and show what they can do.
And sometimes they win.
And it's also about the tournament darlings who lead their team to an extra couple of wins than they really should have had. But does Oakland's Jack Goehlke get the chance at a 32-point game if he's the 10th guy on roster at Kentucky instead of the Sixth-Man of the Year for the Grizzlies making ever 3 he took to beat the Wildcats?
If those cinderellas never win anymore because the big boys take all the guys who could have become tournament darlings and stuff them on the bench playing 10 minutes a game at most - this feels like it's turning into a Marques Warrick comparison. What could he have done in the tournament if Northern Kentucky had won the Horizon League in his senior season? They did make it his junior year and he was held to nine points against Houston - then really, where's the fun of the tournament? Why not just watch the NBA at that point?
So even though I want to watch high-quality basketball, I am much less interested in the tournament if it doesn’t involve a cinderella making it much further than it should, even if that means it then gets blown out by 30 and makes one of the second-weekend games worthless as a viewing product.
Softball Thought
1. Beating Oklahoma, even just one time out of three-game series, is a sign of good things coming for the Tigers.
Losing a series usually isn’t something to be proud of, but there’s a reason Oklahoma hadn’t lost this season.
Let’s look at the teams that gave Oklahoma its seven losses last season. Texas (twice), Oklahoma State (twice), Louisiana, BYU, and Florida.
Texas was the runner-up to OU in the Women’s College World Series last year, Oklahoma State and Florida both made the WCWS, Louisiana hosted a regional and BYU west 31-23.
BYU is the odd one out there, but every other opponent was among the best teams in college softball, earning the right to at least host a regional if not a super regional and a chance at the WCWS.
How about in 2023?
OU lost once. Once. To Baylor, which went 40-18 and made it to the regionals.
And in 2022?
The Sooners lost three games. Once to Texas, once to Oklahoma State and once to UCLA.
Want to guess what those three teams have in common? They all made the WCWS.
And in 2021?
Oklahoma lost four games. Once to Georgia, once to Oklahoma State, once to James Madison and once to Florida State.
Once again, all WCWS teams.
In the four consecutive years the Sooners have won the college softball national championship, they lost 19 total games with only one of those coming to a team that did not make the postseason and only three against teams that didn’t make the WCWS.
Oklahoma softball doesn’t lose to bad teams.
And while the Mizzou softball results haven’t gone the way the team and fans expected through the early portion of the schedule, being one of the few teams (or maybe the only one) that will end up handing Oklahoma a loss this year is a pretty good sign of how the rest of the season is going to go.
Wrestling Thought
1. This is mostly just to shout out Keegan O’Toole. What a career.
There’s not that much to say about him other than call him an all-time Tiger great.
Of course, it wasn’t really possible before recently, but O’Toole became one of a very rare group of five-time All-Americans with his second-place finish on Saturday.
There’s only so many wrestlers each year that get to end the season on a win, he did it four times.
It wasn’t an overall great year for the team, six was the fewest Tigers at the NCAA Championships since the 2009-10 season and Mizzou was one of 27 schools to send six or more.
It was the first losing season for the Tigers since 2000-01 and the fewest dual wins the Tigers had in a season since 1998-99. But it was ravaged by injuries to multiple expected starters, including O’Toole who managed to make his way all the way back to the championship bout with a still-injured leg.
I’m sure we’ll find out more about O’Toole’s injury now that the season has concluded, but the fight he showed to wrestle his way to the biggest stage in wrestling while hampered by an injury (for the second time! He did it in 2021-22 when he was hurt in the NCAA quarterfinals and still went on to win the championship at 165 pounds) was just a fantastic way to end his college career.
Obviously, it didn’t end how he wanted, he was just one takedown away from winning a third championship and never ending a season with a loss, but there’s nothing else you can call his career but incredible and among the all-time greats.
Question
Now that we’ve made it past spring football and basketbal season, what type of summer content are you guys looking for that I could start digging into?
I’ve got ideas laid out, there will be a whole lot of content throughout the Spring and Summer, but I would love to hear some ideas from you guys on stuff you’d like to read.
If there’s any deeper-research ideas that you’re interested in that I can actually dig into during the summer, I would love to hear them. I’m definitely open to reader suggestions as we get to a quieter period.
This week, it’s mostly a spot for me to get out my basketball thoughts I’ve been holding back on since Thursday.
Basketball Thoughts
1. Let’s talk about the season now that there’s been a few days to calm down.
We’ve made it through another sports season, and though it didn’t end well, it’s still a good time to try to bring some perspective and reminisce about the year a bit.
Was it a disappointing end to the season?
Definitely. No question about it.
With the talent and ability the Tigers showed through late January and through February, losing to Drake and letting the Bulldogs dictate exactly what they wanted to do throughout was abhorrent.
I’m not going to go back to before the season for what people were saying would make for a successful basketball season. Obviously coming off last year, just winning a few conference games would have been a success.
This team showed early on that they were better than last season, though that first game against Memphis was scarily reminiscent of issues from the 2023-24 team.
The next handful of games weren’t too telling. There’s only so much to learn against cupcakes, though showing the ability to put up 100 multiple times was still impressive.
Cal didn’t end up being a good team (14-19 overall), but that win showed a resiliency that the Tigers had to show people they were capable of.
Then came the Border War and a win that gave all the students in attendance a memory they will remember forever singing Mr. Brightside on the floor with the players to celebrate.
And I remember asking after that game, “What do the Tigers still need to do to make this season successful?”
A number of the responses still had some amount of “Win a conference game or two” to them, we hadn’t gotten to that point yet so it makes sense for that to still be necessary.
But I also remember a few specific ones. “They beat the Beakers, whatever else happens, it’s been successful.”
The Tigers won the border war, they beat top-5 Florida on their home court, they put up 110 on a top-5 Alabama team. They became the first team to ever go from winless in conference play one year to over-.500 in conference play the next.
Obviously the end of the year was rough, I’m not making excuses for the way it ended. But the first 26 games still happened, they’re still real. Just because the final eight didn’t go the way people wanted/expected doesn’t mean those first 26 no longer exist.
2. Which brings me to addressing the online talk about Dennis Gates.
Nobody serious is talking about Gates being shown the door, and neither should you guys.
Again, the way the season ended sucked. Was Gates’ game plan against Drake really bad? Ya, I think it was.
I didn’t like adjusting the starting lineup to force a moment or only playing Josh Gray six minutes against a team that didn’t have a player less than a head shorter than him. I didn’t agree with not posting up Mark Mitchell if you’re going to use him as your de facto big.
But it’s also not Gates’ fault that Caleb Grill missed multiple open 3s or that Ant Robinson essentially became a liability handling the ball at one of the most important parts of the season.
There are aspects to criticize for sure, but to say Gates hasn’t done a great job in two of his three years (and obviously an awful job in the other one when he was missing the future SEC sixth-man of the year and an All-American guard) is nonsense.
Cuonzo Martin won 20 games once and went over .500 one time out of five years. Kim Anderson won double-digit games once in three years.
Out of the past 10 seasons of Tiger basketball, Gates has the two best seasons in just three opportunities.
He took the Tigers to the Round of 32 for the first time in a decade. Is that good enough? Not if your goal is championships as Gates keeps telling us in the hype video before every game, but considering he just finished
But for a coach in his sixth year at the helm of any program and third in major college basketball, that’s already a pretty good resume.
And he showed through the portal and high school class this year that he is a good recruiter, which raises the long-term floor.
We'll see if he's able to do it again through the transfer portal, which opens up today. Keeping his own players is going to be the first key and right now, it seems like those grumblings we discussed from T.O. Barrett and Peyton Marshall have quieted.
I still wouldn't be surprised if Aidan Shaw entered his name in the portal in the next couple of days, but Gates has convinced him to stay around a couple of times already, if he's really convinced Shaw could play an important role as a senior, I don't doubt his salesmanship.
From what I've heard, I'm not worried about any other player on the roster hitting the portal at this point, including Annor Boateng.
So the sales pitch seems to be working. Things can change fast during portal season, but right now, it seems like the strong majority, if not all of the available players will be back for next season.
3. So let’s take a look at how some historic coaches did in their first six years at the top of any program.
- Mike Krzyzewski had a record of 90-72 (55.6 percent) in his first six years at Army and Duke. He was also 40-47 (46 percent) in his first three years at Duke.
- Jim Calhoun was 81-69 (54 percent) in his first six years at Northeastern and 47-46 (50.5 percent) in his first three years at UConn.
- Even everyone’s favorite Bill Self was 97-76 (56.1 percent) in his first six years at Oral Roberts and Tulsa. He was pretty immediately successful at Illinois and kansas though.
- And Norm Stewart was 98-59 (60.5 percent) in his first six years at Mizzou.
Gates is 105-86 (55 percent) overall in his first six seasons across both Cleveland State and Mizzou.
A lot of coaches take a few years to really get going. Krzyzewski won 20 games in Year 2 at Army, then didn’t again until Year 9 overall, which was Year 4 at Duke. Then he did for 11 consecutive years.
Calhoun didn’t win 20 games until Year 9 overall, but then he did in nine of the next 12 years.
Stewart didn’t win 20 games until Year 5 and it took a while to get a run of them going, but he did 13 of the final 20 years of his career with another two years of 19 and a year of 18 in there.
In the cases of Stewart and Calhoun, teams were playing less games early on, I get that, so let’s talk win percentage.
Gates has had two seasons with a win percentage above .700 and two more above .640.
Stewart took till Year 9 to have four seasons above .640 with two above .700. Calhoun took until Year 10 to hit those marks. Krzyzewski took until Year 10, even Self took until Year 7 to hit those marks.
Gates is ahead of them all in hitting consistent successful seasons early in his career. But obviously that’s marred by the 2023-24 season.
And if you want to talk tournament success, Gates has made the tournament three times in six seasons, including winning a conference tournament at Cleveland State to make it in 2020-21.
He’s been knocked out in the first round twice and made the second round once.
Krzyzewski didn’t make the tournament a third time until Year 11 and got bounced in his first game and the second round in his first two trips, then made the Final Four in the third.
Calhoun didn’t make the tournament a third time until year 12, but let’s give him a chance and look at his time at UConn, where he didn’t make it until Year 4. He was 2-5 in his first five tournaments, with the two wins coming in play-in first-round games before the tournament expanded to 64.
Self didn’t make the tournament for a third time until Year 8. He made the second round, the Sweet 16 and the Elite 8 in his first three trips.
So the tournament success isn't really on Gates' side in a lot of these comparisons, but those other coaches also had a lot more experience to develop their systems before they even got there.
This isn't the case for every great coach of course. There are a number of them who had immediate success. Roy Williams was successful from Year 1, as was Jim Boeheim. John Calipari started his string of great success in Year 3.
I’m not saying Gates is on track to be a hall of famer or saying he’s going to become Krzyzewski if you just give him a chance. But he’s had an overall pretty successful start to his head coaching career and it takes a little longer than people are usually willing to allow nowadays for a lot of coaches to really find their footing.
4. This one isn’t Mizzou specific, just a tournament thought that I can’t get out of my head.
As has been talked about in a couple of threads, the NIL and transfer portal era seems to have limited the amount of upsets as mid-major teams get drained of talent year-over-year and the best players head to major-conference teams.
And fewer upsets likely means better, more-talented overall basketball once we get into the second weekend and the final four. You are much less likely to see a 30-point blowout in the Sweet 16 if there isn’t a 13 seed making it that far.
But I’m also much less compelled by the tournament without those upsets.
It feels similar to the argument between watching the NFL and college football or the NBA and college basketball.
Want to watch the best overall basketball you can? Watch the NBA.
But is it the most compelling or fun to watch? Not to me.
Same with football. The best football, obviously, is being played in the NFL. But college footbal is more fun to watch and often has a lot more fun stories to follow.
And for the tournament specifically, that's because of the cinderellas. Who wants to see a Final Four with all No. 1 seeds? I'm pretty sure that's only happened in 2008 and it led to high-quality basketball. But the point of the tournament, to me at least, is all the small teams finally have a chance to match up with the big boys and show what they can do.
And sometimes they win.
And it's also about the tournament darlings who lead their team to an extra couple of wins than they really should have had. But does Oakland's Jack Goehlke get the chance at a 32-point game if he's the 10th guy on roster at Kentucky instead of the Sixth-Man of the Year for the Grizzlies making ever 3 he took to beat the Wildcats?
If those cinderellas never win anymore because the big boys take all the guys who could have become tournament darlings and stuff them on the bench playing 10 minutes a game at most - this feels like it's turning into a Marques Warrick comparison. What could he have done in the tournament if Northern Kentucky had won the Horizon League in his senior season? They did make it his junior year and he was held to nine points against Houston - then really, where's the fun of the tournament? Why not just watch the NBA at that point?
So even though I want to watch high-quality basketball, I am much less interested in the tournament if it doesn’t involve a cinderella making it much further than it should, even if that means it then gets blown out by 30 and makes one of the second-weekend games worthless as a viewing product.
Softball Thought
1. Beating Oklahoma, even just one time out of three-game series, is a sign of good things coming for the Tigers.
Losing a series usually isn’t something to be proud of, but there’s a reason Oklahoma hadn’t lost this season.
Let’s look at the teams that gave Oklahoma its seven losses last season. Texas (twice), Oklahoma State (twice), Louisiana, BYU, and Florida.
Texas was the runner-up to OU in the Women’s College World Series last year, Oklahoma State and Florida both made the WCWS, Louisiana hosted a regional and BYU west 31-23.
BYU is the odd one out there, but every other opponent was among the best teams in college softball, earning the right to at least host a regional if not a super regional and a chance at the WCWS.
How about in 2023?
OU lost once. Once. To Baylor, which went 40-18 and made it to the regionals.
And in 2022?
The Sooners lost three games. Once to Texas, once to Oklahoma State and once to UCLA.
Want to guess what those three teams have in common? They all made the WCWS.
And in 2021?
Oklahoma lost four games. Once to Georgia, once to Oklahoma State, once to James Madison and once to Florida State.
Once again, all WCWS teams.
In the four consecutive years the Sooners have won the college softball national championship, they lost 19 total games with only one of those coming to a team that did not make the postseason and only three against teams that didn’t make the WCWS.
Oklahoma softball doesn’t lose to bad teams.
And while the Mizzou softball results haven’t gone the way the team and fans expected through the early portion of the schedule, being one of the few teams (or maybe the only one) that will end up handing Oklahoma a loss this year is a pretty good sign of how the rest of the season is going to go.
Wrestling Thought
1. This is mostly just to shout out Keegan O’Toole. What a career.
There’s not that much to say about him other than call him an all-time Tiger great.
Of course, it wasn’t really possible before recently, but O’Toole became one of a very rare group of five-time All-Americans with his second-place finish on Saturday.
There’s only so many wrestlers each year that get to end the season on a win, he did it four times.
It wasn’t an overall great year for the team, six was the fewest Tigers at the NCAA Championships since the 2009-10 season and Mizzou was one of 27 schools to send six or more.
It was the first losing season for the Tigers since 2000-01 and the fewest dual wins the Tigers had in a season since 1998-99. But it was ravaged by injuries to multiple expected starters, including O’Toole who managed to make his way all the way back to the championship bout with a still-injured leg.
I’m sure we’ll find out more about O’Toole’s injury now that the season has concluded, but the fight he showed to wrestle his way to the biggest stage in wrestling while hampered by an injury (for the second time! He did it in 2021-22 when he was hurt in the NCAA quarterfinals and still went on to win the championship at 165 pounds) was just a fantastic way to end his college career.
Obviously, it didn’t end how he wanted, he was just one takedown away from winning a third championship and never ending a season with a loss, but there’s nothing else you can call his career but incredible and among the all-time greats.
Question
Now that we’ve made it past spring football and basketbal season, what type of summer content are you guys looking for that I could start digging into?
I’ve got ideas laid out, there will be a whole lot of content throughout the Spring and Summer, but I would love to hear some ideas from you guys on stuff you’d like to read.
If there’s any deeper-research ideas that you’re interested in that I can actually dig into during the summer, I would love to hear them. I’m definitely open to reader suggestions as we get to a quieter period.
