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1) I’m not going to spend a bunch of time recapping the game on Saturday night. I did that on Saturday night. It was frustrating. It was a game that felt like it could have (if not should have) been won and wasn’t. There were a few of those this year. If we’re being honest, though, there were a few that could have been lost and weren’t. So in the end, I really believe this team ended up about where it should have. At the beginning of the season I thought the ceiling was about a 6 seed, win a game in the tournament, maybe get to the Sweet 16 if you were playing well and pulled an upset. And that’s pretty close to what this team was. I think they should have been a higher seed, but that’s not why they lost on Saturday. The way they played proved the committee probably had them in about the right place. It was a decent season. Any season in which you make the tournament is decent. The reason it feels so hollow is that it seemed like it was going to be so much more at one point. There's not much room for gray area in analysis these days. That's too bad. This wasn't a disastrous year that should have anyone debating Cuonzo Martin's job security. But it also wasn't a year that should leave you swooning in admiration.
2) We’re going to talk a lot about the future in this post. Before we get into it here, make sure you read Mitchell Forde's recap of the season and look ahead from this morning. That discussion has to start with the coaching situation. There is a zero percent chance Cuonzo Martin is fired. Literally zero. Not very small, not slightly more than zero, not almost zero. ZERO. Please, for the love of all that is good and holy, if you don't understand why read his contract. The only way he’s leaving Missouri is on his own and I don’t see that happening. Where is he going to go? Indiana isn’t hiring him. He’s not leaving on his own and slicing his salary to go to a place like Marquette or UNLV (who hired Kevin Kruger yesterday anyway). He’s never struck me as the type of guy who leverages his situation to get an extension or holds the AD hostage. It’s not completely impossible that he leaves, but it’s certainly very unlikely in my opinion. I’m not going to tell you you have to like it. You can feel free to pound your keyboard into submission to let everyone know that you think Missouri should move on from him. But it’s absolutely not going to happen.
3) So the next question revolves around an extension. I’m on record as saying I wouldn’t do it. There are three years left on Martin’s deal. Realistically, he’s not going to be fired for two of them. If I’m Missouri, I want to see what the roster and the team look like next season before I go any further. If you want to do a cosmetic window dressing extension like they did with Barry Odom where you add a year to the contract so you can tell recruits he’s under contract for four more years, fine. Go ahead. But you don’t do an extension that has the possibility of costing the school any more money. Some fans would be mad at the window dressing type extension, but the truth is, those fans don’t understand how contracts work. If you don’t change the amount of money you owe, extra years don’t really matter. And considering Missouri can’t fire him for two more years and even if they fired him before May 1 2023 they would owe him six million dollars, putting any extra financial risk out there would be fairly foolish in my opinion. I haven’t asked anyone what the status of an extension or talks might be. I’m not even sure there have been any. But this is how I’d handle it.
3A) Let’s go a little deeper on Martin: He said earlier this week “there’s a process. Sometimes you get lucky and skip some steps and you pay for it down the road.” This wasn't some random general statement. He was referencing his first team IMO. Missouri pushed all the chips to the middle. It was the right move. Then they got a five-star generational talent who played all of two minutes for them (and came back and kind of played about 70 more but didn’t improve the team and I would argue actually made it worse).
Let’s compare that to a guy who is the toast of the coaching community these days. Said coach is also in his fourth year:
Said coach took over a team that had won 20 games and lost in the first round of the NCAA Tournament as a ten seed. Over his first three seasons, said coach went 51-49, including 20-34 in conference play. He had one losing season and zero NCAA Tournament appearances. He then hired an assistant coach whose brother was the No. 1 player in the country and landed that player. He is 21-9 and played for (but didn’t get) a spot in the Sweet 16 yesterday.
That coach, obviously, is Mike Boynton and the player is Cade Cunningham. My point is, his generational talent stayed healthy and played. Cuonzo’s didn’t. It was awful luck and it set the rebuild back at least a year, maybe two (almost definitely two once Jontay got hurt too).
But this isn’t new ground. The point is, Boynton took over a program in much better shape. He had a decent year in year one (21-15 no tourney) followed by a losing season, a slightly above .500 season and a breakthrough season with a generational talent who will be gone next year. I don’t know if he’s better or worse than Cuonzo. I know what people think as of today (or at least as of yesterday morning) but I think we’ll find out over the next three or four years.
3B) Here’s my Cliff’s Notes version of how Missouri basketball got where it is:
Mike Alden and Mike Anderson got their wires crossed and Anderson left for Arkansas. The Matt Painter deal fell apart and Missouri panicked and hired Frank Haith. Haith, who actually looks better in hindsight than he did to anyone when he was here, won quite a few games, but didn’t get along with his bosses and looked to be doing it with some smoke and mirrors (and apparently a few illegalities). He dealt the program some body blows. Kim Anderson came in, saw a wounded victim and murdered it. After it was dead, he shot it a few more times to make sure it was REALLY dead. Cuonzo took over the corpse. He has it breathing again. Even has gotten it to walk a little bit. It’s a little wobbly. Nobody is sure if he can get it to run or if it’s going to fall down again. Maybe he’s just a guy who brought it back to life and can keep it on its feet but it’s going to take the next guy to get it to be fully functional and to be able to outrun most of its peers again. In other words, he was clearly the right guy (or one of the right guys) to bring it back to life. The next step is getting it back to full health. The jury is out on whether he's the right guy to do that.
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