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1) Missouri lost a basketball game on Saturday by 37 points to a team that may or may not still be its biggest rival depending on your point of view. There's not much more to say about the game. It was ugly and expected. Perhaps the most disheartening part for Missouri fans is this: The first 11 minutes of the game were about as well as Missouri has played all season. And they trailed by seven points and no one watching had any hope they could really make it close for the last 29 minutes. At that point, Javon Pickett was 4-4 from the floor for 11 points. The Tigers had made 3 of 4 three-point attempts. Offensively, they looked pretty good. They were on pace for 76 points. And it wasn't nearly good enough. They were also on pace to lose by 25. So probably the most discouraging thing to come out of Saturday to me is this: Even a really good effort from Missouri isn't nearly good enough to compete with a good team. Nobody went into Saturday expecting a win. Almost nobody went in expecting Missouri to be competitive. It's not the fact that the Tigers didn't have a chance to win on Saturday as much as the fact that absolutely nobody expected them to.
2) Everybody's got a long list of things Cuonzo Martin has done wrong this year. Some of them are on point, some of them are over the top emotional reactions. But Saturday illustrated the major issue: Talent identification. This is Cuonzo Martin's hand-picked roster and it not only had no chance to be competitive with Kansas, but hasn't been competitive with Florida State or Liberty or UMKC. We've gone through the roster issues and the recruiting problems over the last few years ad nauseum. Everyone knows why Mizzou is where it is. But the bigger issue for a lot of Missouri fans was the guys who were the reason Missouri got beat so badly on Saturday. Christian Braun, Ochai Agbaji and Dajuan Harris combined for 47 points in 90 minutes for the Jayhawks. Missouri never had a chance at Braun, despite his brother being on the Tigers' roster. Braun said that on Thursday last week. He grew up a Kansas fan and wasn't going to play for Mizzou. But Harris grew up in Columbia, signed with Missouri State and then started looking around. He said on Saturday he heard from Missouri during his recruitment, but it was after he was already talking to Bill Self. Agbaji was basically unrecruited until he was a senior. I went to a high school all-star game in Kansas City in April of 2017. That game featured quite a few players who were bigger names at the time. And I walked away thinking Agbaji was the best player on the court. He was named the MVP, but told me that day the only school really talking to him much was Texas and a lot of that had to do with his sister being a Longhorn volleyball player. Agbaji said last week when he first moved to Kansas City he was a Mizzou fan. We've gone over and over the fact that Missouri is going to lose a lot of recruiting battles to the traditional powers in college basketball. If you're seeing in-state kids go to Duke and North Carolina and even to Kansas, that's not necessarily the fault of the Missouri coach. And maybe Agbaji would have ended up in Lawrence anyway. But what if the Tigers had gotten in on him months before the other high major schools? It's not like he was a secret. He was an all-state player at Oak Park as a junior. Maybe this is too critical. Maybe Self would have come in and stolen him away in the late stages anyway. But Missouri's best shot is to get in on kids like this before those powerhouses. They didn't do it with two guys that helped bury them on Saturday. Is it hindsight? To some degree, sure. But when things are going as poorly as they are for the Tigers, everybody's looking for reasons why. And this is just another one to add to the list.
3) So we're going to have the same discussion that we've had for the last few weeks and we'll have the same discussion for the next few weeks. What's the temperature of Cuonzo's seat right now? You've got to be a blind fool not to acknowledge that his job is in jeopardy. We've gone over all the reasons why. This is his hand-picked roster and it's really bad with no real signs that it's going to turn around. Is his job in jeopardy? Absolutely. A month ago I'd have said no. Two weeks ago I'd have said I'm not sure. Now, there's no question. There's time to turn it around and save it, but I don't know how you can watch this team and have any reason to believe a turnaround is coming. It's still early enough that it could happen, but the reality is that we are a third of the way through the season and it's the easiest third. Missouri plays nothing but high major teams the rest of the way. The Tigers have played two high major teams, they've been out of both games by halftime and the average margin of defeat is 30 points. Mizzou is 153rd in KenPom this morning. It will be favored only in one game as of today, the last game of the regular season against Georgia. The other 20 games Missouri plays are against teams in the top 100 at KenPom. Sixteen of them are against teams in the top 71 and 15 of them against teams in the top 64. These aren't just teams that are viewed as better than Missouri; they're teams that are viewed as A LOT better. I've previously defined swing games as games that Mizzou has between a 40 and 60% chance to win at KenPom. Of the next 20 games, exactly one falls in that category. The other 19, the site projects today that Mizzou's chances of winning are below 40%.
4) If it's that bad, it's almost impossible to see Martin returning. On my way to post-game interviews I stopped to chat briefly with someone in the Mizzou athletic department. That person said to me, "This is what it's supposed to be like." The person was referencing the atmosphere at Allen Fieldhouse on Saturday, not the result of the game. But that's a huge part of this. When Kim Anderson and Barry Odom were relieved of their duties, the general lack of enthusiasm around the programs was cited as a specific factor. There's not less enthusiasm for Mizzou basketball when there was when Anderson was let go, but there's certainly not any more. If we count actual butts in seats, I'm honestly not sure Mizzou will draw 5,000 to any game the rest of the season.
It's crazy to think how fast this happened. On Saturday, February 6th, Missouri beat Alabama 68-65. The Tide was No. 10 in the country coming into that game. The win vaulted Mizzou to 10th itself. That was 310 days ago. And here we are having a very real discussion about the coach of that team being fired.
Let's go over the contract situation one more time because there still seems to be a lot of misunderstanding about it. Martin cannot be fired until May 1, 2022. At that point, if he is fired, Missouri will owe him $6 million. Now, that does not mean Martin is guaranteed to be the coach until May 1. An agreement can be reached prior to that day and it would be termed a "mutual agreement to part ways" and Missouri would pay him whatever amount of money it would pay him (probably 6 million) and he would move on and the Tigers would go find their next coach. I think it's very likely that happens. If Mizzou decides it needs to go a new direction at some point in the next three months (the Georgia game is March 5 and the SEC Tournament begins March 9), then an agreement would likely be worked out because the Tigers can't wait until May 1 to go hire a new coach. The bottom line is that if Desiree Reed-Francois and Mun Choi and the Mizzou brass believe a new coach is needed, the contract isn't going to prevent that from happening. If it does happen, Martin technically won't be fired, though.
