The Missouri basketball season came to an abrupt and disappointing end Thursday night in Wichita, Kan.
Watching courtside -- which was awesome, by the way -- while I covered the game, the Tigers’ performance was incredibly frustrating.
Missouri came out flat, was abysmal offensively throughout and had no answer for the in-your-face defense Drake played.
If you want it in simpler terms, Ben McCollum outcoached Dennis Gates by a wide margin.
It didn’t take a basketball savant to figure that out, and Tiger fans were very quick to jump on Gates for another upset loss in March Madness.
While Gates deserves his share of the blame, let’s pump the breaks on conversations about him on a hot seat.
It was a dreadful end to the season -- Missouri lost six of its final eight games, including a 1-5 mark in March -- but Gates was able to steady the program after an injury-derailed 2023-24 season left his team 0-18 in SEC play.
Gates is a proven recruiter, and that is more than half the battle as a college basketball coach in the transfer portal era.
And at the end of the day, Jimmys and Joes go a long way in basketball.
The portion where Gates needs to improve, and he still has plenty of time to do so as a 45-year old coach, is his in-game adjustments.
Gates’ system of speeding the game up on both ends and trying to outscore opponents is my favorite style of basketball in this era, but when things aren’t working, he does not seem to have a Plan B.
And I believe that was probably the biggest reason for the collapse at the end of the season.
Missouri’s high-powered offense took a step back as teams got more game film to break down and study in preparation, and the defense was flawed the entire season when it didn’t force turnovers, so that side of the ball was never going to carry the way for the team.
But the players are not blameless, either.
Tamar Bates largely disappeared down the stretch, Caleb Grill’s 3-point numbers regressed to the mean, Anthony Robinson II became unplayable at times and there was no threat to score at the rim besides Mark Mitchell, whose knee injury in the SEC Tournament also played a factor in Thursday’s loss as he was ineffective at best.
So how do I grade the season?
I’ll start with this. The grade will not be on a curve because of a turnaround from last year. This era of college basketball has so much roster turnover year by year that one season does not carry as much weight into the next as it used to.
But the grade is still a solid one, I’d say probably a B-minus.
Making the NCAA Tournament leading a program that’s never reached a Final Four is acceptable, even if it ends in a first-round exit. It’s definitely not something that puts a coach on the hot seat in Year 3.
It was a fun season at the least.
Missouri knocked off Kansas when it was No. 1, which bumps the season grade up at least a half letter, and had two more wins against AP top-five teams in Florida and Alabama.
And with the SEC having more talent this year than any season since the Tigers joined the league, Missouri finishing in a tie for sixth warrants more appreciation than it would’ve any other year.
The next question is, what will next year look like?
Circling back to what I said earlier about momentum from year to year, I have no idea.
Ten scholarship players on roster have eligibility left for next season, but with six of those players receiving little to no playing time this season, it is hard to imagine all 10 will be on the roster in a couple of months.
I won’t even begin to speculate which players will enter the portal, but it is inevitable some of them do.
But when those departures happen, I fully trust Gates will be able to plug the holes with equally talented, if not more talented, players.
So let’s pump the breaks on hot-seat talk for now. Circle back to me at this time next year if Missouri is either a first-round exit again or a team not in the tournament at all, and that tune may change.