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1) We're going to start with two regressions to the mean in basketball this weekend. First, on the men's side, Missouri beat No. 15 Alabama 92-86. We'll get into some more specifics about it in a bit, but the overarching picture is that Mizzou won a game absolutely nobody thought it was going to win. That's going to happen over the course of a 32 game season. I don't know overall what Saturday meant for the year, other than this: The hyperbolic foolishness of "this is Kim Anderson bad" can end now. Missouri is 7-7. It's lost some blowouts and it's lost a couple of games that nobody thought it should lose. The season has been disappointing. It will not end up as what anyone would term overly successful. But it's not historically bad. Anybody making those claims--and, yes, there are some people who have been making them--should be ignored.
2) The women's team also moved closer to the middle, although that movement came in the opposite direction. In their first game after beating No. 1 South Carolina, Missouri struggled some, but managed to beat Auburn. No such luck on Saturday in Fayetteville. Arkansas raced out to a 17-point halftime lead and beat Robin Pingeton's team 83-73 in a game that Missouri never really had a chance to win. The Tigers just dug themselves too big a hole. Missouri turned the ball over on 19.7% of its possessions and shot just 52% (13-25) on layups. That's not gonna win you many games, especially when the opposition turns the ball over two (TWO!) times. Arkansas scored 13 points off turnovers. Missouri scored three. The final margin was ten. Like the men weren't nearly as bad as they looked, the women aren't quite as good as beating the top ranked team in the country and taking another top five team to the wire. Don't get me wrong, they're having a good year and the NCAA Tournament should be the expectation. I'm just not sure that being a host in the NCAA Tournament should be the expectation or that anyone should be TOO outraged that they aren't ranked in the top 25.
3) I want to go back to the men's win over Alabama because that's the one I was at. It was probably the best I've seen a Cuonzo Martin team look on offense, and it was definitely the best I've seen a Martin team that I didn't already think was pretty good offensively look on offense. The Tigers scored on 59.4% of their possessions. They had 16 offensive rebounds for 17 second chance points. They made a season-high nine three-pointers, but while that's a big number for this team, it's not that big a number. Normally, teams that score 92 points are going to have made more than nine threes. Missouri was just incredibly efficient everywhere else. The Tigers were 22/38 (57.9%) from two-point range, got to the line 27 times and had 19 assists on 30 field goals. It kind of shoots down the "Martin doesn't know how to run an offense" crowd. The difference was pretty simple: Shots went in. They executed better on offense. Maybe you believe Martin completely revamped his offensive strategy in the ten days since the Kentucky game and magically is a better coach. I tend to think the players probably just played better. It also doesn't hurt that Alabama isn't exactly an elite defensive team. The Tide's strategy is to outshoot and outscore you. Most of the time, 86 points is going to be enough to do that. It wasn't on Saturday. Alabama played the game it mostly wanted to play. Missouri just played it better.
4) Kobe Brown deserves his own special section. Missouri's not going to win enough games for him to get SEC player of the year votes and that's probably fair, but he's absolutely on track for an all-SEC first-team season. Brown is 10th in the league in scoring (15.3), despite being 16th in shots attempted per game (10.2). He is averaging 1.5 points for every field goal attempt. Here is that stat for every other Mizzou player averaging more than five shots per game:
Amari Davis: 1.05
Boogie Coleman: 1.01
Javon Pickett: 0.97
DaJuan Gordon: 0.98
Ronnie DeGray: 1.31
Brown is basically 50% more efficient offensively than any player besides DeGray. He has made 23 more shots than any other player on the team despite taking just 14 more. He is third in the league in field goal percentage at 52.3% (no other Tiger is better than 40.3). He is shooting 61.1% inside the three-point line. He's also the fourth-leading rebounder in the SEC and averages 3.4 more than anyone else on the team. He's two assists behind Coleman for the team lead.
It is not surprising that Brown is Missouri's leading scorer and rebounder. Everyone expected that coming in. The margin is surprising to me. And these numbers show that he should actually be taking far more shots than he's taking. He averages 10.3 field goal attempts per game. Missouri might be fine if that number was closer to 15. The other option is for him to get some actual consistent help like he did on Saturday.
5) This week brought the unpredictability of the transfer portal to Mizzou. Mekhi Wingo entered the portal and we've beaten that subject to death. I bring it up simply because I hadn't heard a whisper of it until the day it happened. Last night, Dreyden Norwood told us he was transferring from Texas A&M to Missouri. Norwood entered the portal about a month ago, but didn't announce his entry on social media, never tweeted about an offer (from Missouri or anyone else) and hasn't even commented publicly, other than returning a text message to confirm that he was indeed transferring to Mizzou. I'd never heard his name before. High school kids are generally broadcasting every step of the recruiting process. Most of the transfers aren't (see Connor Bazelak, who tweeted he was leaving and then tweeted he was committed). The point is, there's no reason to freak out that Missouri isn't as active in the transfer portal as you want them to be. They probably are. We just don't know about it because it's generally a much less public process.
