We are officially in crossover season. For the next three weeks, at least, the football and basketball teams are both in season. We'll do our best to divide the ten thoughts relatively evenly over that period of time. Because basketball is the shiny new toy that opens the season tonight, we'll start off with that.
1) Monday is the first game that counts for Dennis Gates. I thought it was interesting that he was forthright about experimenting with things in the exhibition against WashU. Maybe his starting five that night is going to be his starting five every night or maybe, as he said, he just kind of randomly picked a group right before tipoff. Saying that he was intentionally trying to disrupt guys' rhythm and throw them off a little bit during the game was interesting as well. I'm sure plenty of coaches do things like that, I just don't know that I'd had one actually say it to us before. The point is, we got to see the parts of the puzzle on Friday night, but I'm not really sure we found out anything about the way they're going to fit together. Not that a game against Southern Indiana is going to give us the greatest indication of what this team will be, but it is a real game against another team that counts in the standings and it's going to be treated as such.
2) Let's be clear about the next month: Anything less than 7-0 will be disappointing. Drew King is going to have a story today about how Mizzou put the non-conference schedule together for year one. The first half of it is....quite light. The average KenPom ranking of the first seven opponents is 270. That includes three teams ranked 300 or lower (out of 363). The only two in the top 200 are Penn (162) and Coastal Carolina (178). New roster, new coach, whatever, none of these are games that Missouri should lose. Truthfully, none should really be in much doubt. Weird things do happen in college basketball and losing one of these games wouldn't mean Dennis Gates is doomed to fail or anything so severe. But it would be a sign that the first year might be a little bit bumpier than you're hoping it will be. The Tigers should be 7-0 when they head to Wichita on November 29. And then we'll really get to find out what realistic hopes for this team are.
3) Here are the things I'm pretty sure I feel good about with this squad:
*Kobe Brown is a legit all-SEC caliber player. That doesn't mean he'll definitely make the first team, but he's gotten better every year. He is stronger and leaner and more athletic this season. He had 25 points and 11 rebounds without breaking much of a sweat on Friday night. What Missouri does is going to run through him.
*There are multiple ballhandlers which is a sight for sore eyes after last season. Nick Honor and Sean East can both run the point. Isiaih Mosley can bring it up and might be the best passer on the team. D'Moi Hodge, Tre Gomillion and Dre Gholston are capable of helping handle the ball if needed.
*Missouri will be more athletic and play faster than it did a year ago. Cuonzo Martin talked about needing to become more offensive and up-tempo but in the end he fell back on his roots: Defense. His teams played a style of basketball that, even when effective, wasn't necessarily the most exciting thing to watch. I think this year's team will play a more aesthetically pleasing brand of basketball.
*A lot of guys are going to play and we may not have a real handle on a regular rotation until the bigger names on the schedule show up.
4) Here are the things I don't know and/or some concerns:
*How do they compensate for a severe lack of size? Brown is the biggest guy we know is going to play significant minutes. Aidan Shaw is going to play for this team but how much and how soon we don't know. He's also going to benefit from a full year in the weight room. Mo Diarra barely saw the floor against WashU. He's tall, but is he ready to help out early or will he be soon? If the answer to that question is no, does Missouri go more zone than we expect? Do they full court press and try to speed games up?
*Who are the odd men out in the rotation? Gates is going to play 11 or 12 guys, at least early. Ronnie DeGray didn't get off the bench in the exhibition. Is there a reason for that or was it a temporary thing? While he may play 12 guys, it's probably more like ten who get significant minutes. Here are the ones we KNOW will play quite a bit: Kobe Brown, Gholston, Mosley, Gomillion, Hodge, Honor, East, Noah Carter, Shaw. That leaves Kaleb Brown, DeGray and Diarra fighting for minutes. There are only so many to go around.
*How well can they shoot it? I'm confident they're better than the 5/18 performance against WashU. I'm confident they're better than the last couple of Missouri teams we've seen. How much better, we don't know.
We start to get some answers in about 12 hours.
5) So let's move on to football, which now has only 19 days and three games guaranteed left to play. We won't go too deep into the Kentucky game because we did that on Saturday. Also, we've already seen that game a few times this year. Not that specific game--credit to Mizzou, it does, even after decades of wild twists, keep finding new painful ways to come up short--but very similar games. Missouri has played seven games against Power Five opponents. Five have been decided by one score and six by 13 points or less. All six were in doubt in the fourth quarter. In those six games, Missouri has given up 115 points and scored 110. On the surface, you'd expect that to translate to 3-3 so Mizzou is probably a game worse than the law of averages says it should be. There are two ways to look at that:
Missouri has been unlucky.
Missouri has underachieved.
Both are probably true to some extent and I'm not really interested in assigning percentages of blame. I'm a believer that you finish with the record you earn. Here's what Missouri is: A team that plays to the level of its competition. Are they more the team that could have beaten No. 1 or the team that could have lost to Vanderbilt, the only Power Five program in the country that hasn't won a conference game? They've played six games against Power Five teams that could have gone either way. They've made enough plays to win two of them and enough plays to lose four of them. So I think they're a team that finds a way to lose more often than one that finds a way to win. Those that want to believe they're better than their record will point out the freak ways they've lost to Auburn and Kentucky. That's not invalid. But there are 100 ways those games could have been won before letting a freak play at the end decide it.
1) Monday is the first game that counts for Dennis Gates. I thought it was interesting that he was forthright about experimenting with things in the exhibition against WashU. Maybe his starting five that night is going to be his starting five every night or maybe, as he said, he just kind of randomly picked a group right before tipoff. Saying that he was intentionally trying to disrupt guys' rhythm and throw them off a little bit during the game was interesting as well. I'm sure plenty of coaches do things like that, I just don't know that I'd had one actually say it to us before. The point is, we got to see the parts of the puzzle on Friday night, but I'm not really sure we found out anything about the way they're going to fit together. Not that a game against Southern Indiana is going to give us the greatest indication of what this team will be, but it is a real game against another team that counts in the standings and it's going to be treated as such.
2) Let's be clear about the next month: Anything less than 7-0 will be disappointing. Drew King is going to have a story today about how Mizzou put the non-conference schedule together for year one. The first half of it is....quite light. The average KenPom ranking of the first seven opponents is 270. That includes three teams ranked 300 or lower (out of 363). The only two in the top 200 are Penn (162) and Coastal Carolina (178). New roster, new coach, whatever, none of these are games that Missouri should lose. Truthfully, none should really be in much doubt. Weird things do happen in college basketball and losing one of these games wouldn't mean Dennis Gates is doomed to fail or anything so severe. But it would be a sign that the first year might be a little bit bumpier than you're hoping it will be. The Tigers should be 7-0 when they head to Wichita on November 29. And then we'll really get to find out what realistic hopes for this team are.
3) Here are the things I'm pretty sure I feel good about with this squad:
*Kobe Brown is a legit all-SEC caliber player. That doesn't mean he'll definitely make the first team, but he's gotten better every year. He is stronger and leaner and more athletic this season. He had 25 points and 11 rebounds without breaking much of a sweat on Friday night. What Missouri does is going to run through him.
*There are multiple ballhandlers which is a sight for sore eyes after last season. Nick Honor and Sean East can both run the point. Isiaih Mosley can bring it up and might be the best passer on the team. D'Moi Hodge, Tre Gomillion and Dre Gholston are capable of helping handle the ball if needed.
*Missouri will be more athletic and play faster than it did a year ago. Cuonzo Martin talked about needing to become more offensive and up-tempo but in the end he fell back on his roots: Defense. His teams played a style of basketball that, even when effective, wasn't necessarily the most exciting thing to watch. I think this year's team will play a more aesthetically pleasing brand of basketball.
*A lot of guys are going to play and we may not have a real handle on a regular rotation until the bigger names on the schedule show up.
4) Here are the things I don't know and/or some concerns:
*How do they compensate for a severe lack of size? Brown is the biggest guy we know is going to play significant minutes. Aidan Shaw is going to play for this team but how much and how soon we don't know. He's also going to benefit from a full year in the weight room. Mo Diarra barely saw the floor against WashU. He's tall, but is he ready to help out early or will he be soon? If the answer to that question is no, does Missouri go more zone than we expect? Do they full court press and try to speed games up?
*Who are the odd men out in the rotation? Gates is going to play 11 or 12 guys, at least early. Ronnie DeGray didn't get off the bench in the exhibition. Is there a reason for that or was it a temporary thing? While he may play 12 guys, it's probably more like ten who get significant minutes. Here are the ones we KNOW will play quite a bit: Kobe Brown, Gholston, Mosley, Gomillion, Hodge, Honor, East, Noah Carter, Shaw. That leaves Kaleb Brown, DeGray and Diarra fighting for minutes. There are only so many to go around.
*How well can they shoot it? I'm confident they're better than the 5/18 performance against WashU. I'm confident they're better than the last couple of Missouri teams we've seen. How much better, we don't know.
We start to get some answers in about 12 hours.
5) So let's move on to football, which now has only 19 days and three games guaranteed left to play. We won't go too deep into the Kentucky game because we did that on Saturday. Also, we've already seen that game a few times this year. Not that specific game--credit to Mizzou, it does, even after decades of wild twists, keep finding new painful ways to come up short--but very similar games. Missouri has played seven games against Power Five opponents. Five have been decided by one score and six by 13 points or less. All six were in doubt in the fourth quarter. In those six games, Missouri has given up 115 points and scored 110. On the surface, you'd expect that to translate to 3-3 so Mizzou is probably a game worse than the law of averages says it should be. There are two ways to look at that:
Missouri has been unlucky.
Missouri has underachieved.
Both are probably true to some extent and I'm not really interested in assigning percentages of blame. I'm a believer that you finish with the record you earn. Here's what Missouri is: A team that plays to the level of its competition. Are they more the team that could have beaten No. 1 or the team that could have lost to Vanderbilt, the only Power Five program in the country that hasn't won a conference game? They've played six games against Power Five teams that could have gone either way. They've made enough plays to win two of them and enough plays to lose four of them. So I think they're a team that finds a way to lose more often than one that finds a way to win. Those that want to believe they're better than their record will point out the freak ways they've lost to Auburn and Kentucky. That's not invalid. But there are 100 ways those games could have been won before letting a freak play at the end decide it.
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