Mizzou Basketball: Cuonzo Martin making Missouri relevant again
Mizzou basketball won its first conference road game in nearly four years when the Tigers defeated South Carolina in the Gamecocks’ house. Cuonzo Martin surely looks the part of a head coach that will be at MU for years to come.
All Mizzou basketball fans wanted was a team that could compete in games. The Kim Anderson era did not provide that whatsoever, as the Tigers lost games to Eastern Illinois, Lipscomb, and North Carolina Central in Anderson’s final year as the head coach.
This isn’t a post dedicated to bashing Kim Anderson (he coached my alma mater to a National Championship in 2014, so I’m forever grateful to him for that), but it’s hard to look back at what he did at Missouri and call it anything other than a train wreck. Sure, Anderson was stepping into a tough situation with the program, but man… Those three years were downright awful.
Cuonzo Martin is in his first year of coaching Missouri hoops and he’s already done what Anderson couldn’t do in three years at the helm: Win an SEC game on the road. That’s right… In three years, Missouri went 0-27 on the road against their conference opponents. Martin is already 1-0.
Martin’s name wasn’t the biggest when the Tigers hired him back in March, but he’s already shown to be an improvement over Anderson. For one, Martin hit the recruiting trail hard, getting big names like Michael Porter Jr., Jontay Porter, and Jeremiah Tilmon to commit to Mizzou.
Cuonzo Martin has done a great job turning the program around.
While Michael Porter Jr. has only played for two minutes this season, the hope is that he can eventually return. Even without the freshman in the lineup, MU is still doing quite well so far this season, currently posting an 11-3 record. Kim Anderson never won 11 games while coaching the Missouri Tigers.
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The Tigers have a long road ahead still, but Martin is already a huge improvement over what this program had seen over the past few years. If Missouri can keep their heads above water until Porter can return, they could be a scary team to face in the NCAA Tournament come March.
The fact that the Tigers are still looking quite impressive is a testament to how well Martin is coaching his team. It would have been easy for the players to have given up once Porter went down, but they’ve kept competing and that’s all on Cuonzo Martin.
Aside from the guys Martin brought in via recruiting, Kassius Robertson and Jordan Barnett are both having nice seasons as well. Hopefully that good mojo against South Carolina carries over into this weekend, as Missouri will host the Florida Gators on Saturday and will host the Georgia Bulldogs on Wednesday.
Florida is usually pretty good, but they’ve had a few bumps in the road early on this year. They’ll be a tough match-up for the Tigers in an early SEC match-up for MU. The Gators are 2-0 in SEC play and will look to move to 3-0 against Mizzou.
As for Georgia, they’re 10-3 on the year and 1-1 in conference play. That should be a game that Cuonzo Martin and the Missouri Tigers can knock off in Columbia.
Mizzou basketball is relevant again and that’s all that fans were asking for this time last year. Cuonzo Martin has done a great job turning the program around after what will be known as some serious dark years for the hoops program.