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Full disclosure, we're in the part of the year where it's virtually impossible to come up with ten things that have to do with Mizzou sports so there will be a mix of Mizzou stuff and national stuff for the next 2-3 months in this space.
1) Kevin Keatts is now Exhibit A for those who will advocate for patience with a coach. Let me be clear, I'm not saying that's necessarily always the right approach. I'm just saying Keatts is the argument in your favor if you argue that it is.
Keatts took over a program that had been to four NCAA Tournaments in the previous 11 seasons. NC State had once been a great program and for quite a while was a decent one. When he took over in 2017-18 it had started to slip to the wrong side of the bubble in terms of relevant national programs. The Wolfpack made the NCAA Tournament in his first year, then got progressively worse over the next four seasons in which they didn't dance (24-12, 20-12, 14-11, 11-21). A lot of schools would have fired him then. He was 90-68, four years removed from his only tournament appearance, without a tournament win and trending in the wrong direction.
He probably saved his job with a 23-11 season in 2022-23, but the Wolfpack lost again in the first round. There's no way he was out of the woods in terms of job security entering this year. NC State entered the ACC Tournament 17-14 as the 10 seed in a league most considered to be down from what it normally is. They then won five games in five days to make the NCAA Tournament and trigger an automatic two-year contract extension for Keatts. They won four straight games over the last two weekends to make their first Final Four in 41 years and Keatts is now untouchable for at least a couple of years.
Every coach who's fighting for his job is going to use that example as to what can happen if you just give him a little bit more time. Again, I'm not saying it's necessarily applicable in every case, but it's going to be used in every case.
2) You want more proof how thin the line is between success failure? Here you go:
This is going to be remembered as one of the three best seasons in NC State basketball history regardless of what happens next weekend. And if Virginia makes a free throw, or if NC State doesn't make a miracle banked in three that defied some of the laws of physics, it doesn't happen and the coach is fired and most of us never know who DJ Burns is.
We like to run around and proclaim things as the best or the worst and anoint or bury everyone. The truth is, the margin between being a great team that's remembered forever and a bad team that's forgotten the day after the season ends just isn''t that big. I don't know enough about NC State basketball to do this, but I can virtually guarantee you can go back and find five plays that would have had the Wolfpack at 20 wins or better and already in the tournament entering the ACC Tournament. You can almost certainly also go back and find five that would have had them sub-500 with Keatts fate sealed. The Wolfpack had played 1455 minutes of basketball before the last two weeks. Change 5.3 seconds and the whole thing looks different.
3) What the Wolfpack has done should give Mizzou fans hope for next season.
You can change your roster--and the fate of your program--in a few weeks in April. That's what Dennis Gates has to do. We're going to spend the next two months debating every transfer to whom Mizzou is tied, whether Gates should or shouldn't take him, what he needs, who he lands, who he misses on. None of it matters. He just has to get it right. If he does, there's no reason in the world people can't be talking about Mizzou 12 months from now the way they're talking about NC State right now. If he doesn't, we'll be talking about whether he deserves another chance to get it right next offseason.
4) I'd expect more movement on that front this week. I don't specifically know what that movement will look like, but I'd be shocked if there isn't more movement. There has to be. As of today, Mizzou has 13 scholarship players coming back for next season--and that's not even counting Jesus Carralero-Martin, who we've reported is entering the portal, but who hasn't actually done so yet.
Let's live, for a moment, in some fantasy world where all of those players come back and Missouri adds another 3-4 transfers (which is the number we expect). That gives you 16 or 17 scholarship caliber players. Even if you play the game and have three or four of them on NIL deals rather than traditional scholarships, it's too many. There's simply not playing time for all of them. You're going to end up with one of two scenarios:
Either you're trying to play 12-14 players every single night and never settle on anything resembling a regular rotation (that happened this year) or you're going to have 5-6 players who aren't playing nearly as much as they think they should (or at all) and they're mostly going to transfer out at the end of the year and you're going to be back in the portal looking for five or six players again next year (which is too many on an annual basis in my mind; you have to use the portal, but you should be using it to plug holes, not to completely revamp the roster every single offseason).
We expect Tamar Bates and Anthony Robinson back based on what we've been told. We think Caleb Grill and John Tonje are coming back. We know Jacob Crews will be here next year as well as the five freshmen. That's ten. As I said, we expect three or four more additions (a big man, two point guard capable players--even if they're not both strictly traditional point guards--and maybe another best available). What's that mean for Aidan Shaw, Trent Pierce and Jordan Butler? We wait and see. Again, we can all argue our point of view on who should stay and who should go. But the only thing that matters is that Gates makes the right decisions.
5) Despite everything I've already typed here, Kevin Keatts is not a substantially different coach than he was yesterday or six weeks ago. Neither is Matt Painter. But both are now going to be viewed in a completely different light. They've made a Final Four. It's the equivalent of winning a major in golf.
I think the best analogy for Painter is pre-2004 Phil Mickelson. Mickelson was one of the best players in the world; many would have had him as high as No. 2 at that point in time. But every time he'd had a chance to win the big one, he'd failed to do it. I don't think anybody would have said Painter was the second-best coach in college basketball before yesterday, but he should have been in everyone's top ten. Prior to yesterday, he was 470-207, a .694 winning percentage. He'd won nearly 65% of his conference games and gone to 16 NCAA Tournaments out of a possible 18 at Southern Illinois and Purdue. He'd had 12 seasons with 25 or more wins and won or tied for six regular season conference championships. But he was the best player never to win a major.
He won his major yesterday. The Boilermakers are in the Final Four for the first time in 44 seasons. They've had teams that were good enough to get there without question. They'd been a top four seed 15 times in those 44 years, including a 1 seed four times and a 2 seed three other times. But they'd never won four games in a row at the right time. They did. Painter will now be viewed where he should have been viewed all along--as one of the top handful of coaches in all of college basketball. It's a completely arbitrary line. Regular season record and success are a far better indicator of how good a coach you are than two weeks in March in the most random sporting event of them all. But that's not how the world works. If you don't succeed in the tournament and make the Final Four at some point, you're never going to be viewed as one of the best. Make it once and it changes the way everyone talks about the job you've done.
