I wasn’t watching the game 20 years ago. I don’t remember why, exactly, as I usually found time to make sure I watched the annual Braggin’ Rights game. It was the first season I was coaching with the varsity at Webster Groves, so perhaps we had some game or practice or something going on. It probably didn’t help that the Tigers were already 4-4 before the game with losses to Sam Houston State and Davidson, plus they had barely beating Texas A&M Corpus Christi and Furman the preceeding two games. The omens were there it was going to be a tough season in Columbia.
So an ugly loss to an Illinois team who would start the season 15-0 and were ranked inside the top 10 of the AP poll wasn’t all that surprising. That it was ugly enough to cause a fan to dump popcorn on Quin Snyder’s head was, perhaps, the only thing that made it more remarkable than it was.
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This isn’t any advocation for dumping popcorn on anyones head. It’s just a recollection of the worst loss in Braggin’ Rights’ history… until last night.
Missouri lost by 43 points last night, in their second worst non-conference loss in the history of the program. And the 7th worst loss overall. It was about as bad of a performance as I’ve watched. Coupled with about as good of one from Illinois.
Mizzou sucked. They struggled to generate any kind of offense, and they left all kinds of Illini shooters open on defense. When they did get Illinois to miss a shot, they didn’t collect the rebound. It was as complete of an ass-whipping as there is in College Basketball.
Because I’m a weirdo I looked it up. There have been 588 wins of 20 or more points involving two D1 basketball teams so far this year. 35 of those games involved a high major team as the loser. Missouri’s 43 point loss to Illinois ranks as THE WORST loss of any high major team this season. Only 12 other teams have lost by 30 or more. The good news (if there is any) is there’s a list of some pretty decent teams: Kentucky, Auburn, Texas Tech. The bad news, also on the list is DePaul, Penn State, Florida State… teams that are going through it.
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Missouri looks like a team going through it.
TEAM STATS
There really should be a small bit of tipping of the cap to Illinois, they played extremely well. On their first offensive possession, Missouri was flying around defensively, hitting their spots, and then with a few seconds left on the shot clock, Andrej Stojakovic drained a three pointer. While little Peja is regarded as a very good player, he’s hit 8 threes all season and generally not really regarded as a shooter. But he made the shot, that’s a tip your cap possession. Missouri forced extra passes, and got the ball into the hands of a 25% three point shooter on the season and he made the shot.
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On the season Illinois has made 35% of their threes, then in Braggin’ Rights they made 45.5%. Missouri was the opposite. They shot the ball poorly. But this is the thing with shooting variance, which I talk about a lot, if Illinois had an average shooting night, this is still a blowout. Missouri shooting their average is just two more made threes, Illinois shooting their average is just 3.5 fewer. A swing of 15-18 points still makes this a 25+ point blowout.
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A big part of that is that Missouri shot just 29.4% from inside the arc, it was the worst mark of the Gates era, besting their 14-41 performance against Auburn two years ago.
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They also gave up 15 offensive rebounds, which led to 29 second chance points. If you want to calculate that it’s 1.93 points per possession when they got an offensive rebound. Considering they missed 28 shots, getting more than a point per possession when you miss is a helluva stat.
I won’t freak out about some of the other low stats like the assist rates. Illinois canned a lot of threes, that usually results in a lot of assists. Missouri missed everything, that usually results in very few assists. They did generate a few steals, but outside of that the Illini didn’t turn the ball over enough to really offset what they were doing shooting the ball, and it gave Mizzou basically no easy baskets.
INDIVIDUAL STATS
Trifecta: Sebastian Mack, Anthony Robinson, Mark Mitchell
On the season: Mark Mitchell 27, Jacob Crews 17, Anthony Robinson 13, Jayden Stone 7, Jevon Porter 5, Shawn Phillips Jr. 4, Sebastian Mack 3, T.O. Barrett 1, Annor Boateng 1
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This is as ugly of a Box as I’ve seen. It really valued Sebastian Mack for simply being the only guy who wasn’t bad offensively, and even he was 3-8 from inside the arc.
But the Sophomore class combined to go 1-8 from 2FG, 0-6 from 3FG, and only four free throws attempted.
As good as Jacob Crews has been all year, he wasn’t in this game. 1-9 from the floor. Where he’s been surprisingly good this year is from 2FG and even those easier putback type baskets he couldn’t buy the other night. It was just one big struggle bus for the whole team.
Mizzou has been better with Luke Northweather on the floor for much of the season, and often it’s about what he doesn’t do as much as what he does do. He doesn’t clog the lane, he doesn’t over help. He doesn’t do much of anything some times. But Northweather didn’t do anything in this game, almost literally. A 0% usage rate for a guy in 13 minutes is almost amazing.
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There’s just no good here.
Missouri has been trending in the wrong direction for a while now and I’m not sure what the fix with this roster is going to be other than just get to the offseason and retool. We’ve seen some awful rosters at Missouri and I’m not convinced this is one of them. They have talent, they have a team built to play fast and attack the rim, and they just don’t do it well enough. They have two guys who should be amongst the best in the SEC. But through a mix of injuries, lineup weirdness, and just some general poor construction in the offseason, this team just kind of stinks.
They shouldn’t be as bad as we’ve seen against KU and Illinois. But the combined loss total in those games (-63) echoes the 2021 season (-62) where Cuonzo Martin was running out Dajuan Gordon, Boogie Coleman, and Amari Davis against the eventual national champion Jayhawks and an Illinois team with Kofi Cockburn.
There have been a lot of weird blowout games this year. I’m not sure what sort of indicator it is for college basketball when good teams and bad teams a like are getting their doors blown off. But there are still plenty of teams out there who are showing competitiveness and fight. Missouri has more than a week to figure out how they’re going to enter SEC play and put up fight.
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It starts early with Florida.
I’ve moved the glossary to a static page at RockM+ to reduce the size of the bottom of this post.
So if you’re looking for what any of these stats mean, Check out the Glossary!
In attempting to update Study Hall, I’ve moved away from Touches/Possession and moving into the Rates a little more. This is a little experimental so if there’s something you’d like to see let me know and I’ll see if there’s an easy visual way to present it.
If there’s something you’d like to see more of an explanation on, drop a note and let me know!
