Mizzou Basketball: Now in March, who are these Missouri Tigers?

Luckily, I’ve been able to watch or listen to quite a bit of Missouri basketball this season. The first game I caught took place on Dec. 2. Missouri faced the Oregon Ducks…in Omaha, Nebraska.

2020, am I right?

Oregon’s a good team. Not bad, not great, but a solidly built team that’s currently ranked No. 21. For what it’s worth, they’re tops in the Pac-12 with a 13-4 conference record. Overall, the Ducks are 18-5.

In their first game of the season, Missouri defeated them, 83-75 behind the excellent play of guard Xavier Pinson, who finished with 22 points on 5 of 11 shooting, including going 9-for-10 from the free-throw line and 3-for-7 from three. He chipped in three assists, collected four rebounds, and committed only two turnovers.

Ah, if only these young men played like that consistently. But consistency and young people hardly go together. Pinson’s inconsistent play is a perfect barometer for Mizzou’s entire season.

Missouri won their next four games, three of them against teams that either are going to make the tournament or should. The biggest win in that streak came against hated* rival Illinois in the annual Braggin’ Rights game. For the first time in ages, that game didn’t take place in St. Louis. With Missouri winning a coin toss, they hosted and won a hard-fought game, 81-78.

*At least, I hate them.

The Tigers sat for 10 days before beating Bradley by a point in a snoozer. They then sat for another eight days before suffering their first loss when the Tennessee Volunteers came into Columbia and stomped them, 73-53.

Missouri rebounded nicely by throttling Arkansas on the road, but then came the team’s first true collapse on Jan. 5 against a below-average Mississippi State. Missouri led by 12 going into halftime, 39-27, and then got truly annihilated in the second half, as the Bulldogs outscored them by 27 (!) points to win, 78-63.

Then the Jekel* came out again as the Tigers rolled off six wins in seven games with road victories over Texas A&M (68-52) and Tennessee (73-64) and home victories over TCU (102-98), Kentucky (75-70), and No. 10 Alabama, a game in which the Tigers led 60-39 with less than 10 minutes to play and only barely managed to hang on, 68-65.

*Robert Louis Stevenson messed up the spelling, guys.

It would be a harbinger of things to come.