For quite a few years, opposing coaches would walk into the postgame press conference and talk about how tough Mizzou was and how the Tigers were headed in the right direction and how they had a really good coach who was clearly the right guy to lead the program back to its previous heights. More often than not, those words came after said coach had just beaten Missouri as another Tiger season went wandering in the wilderness and limping to the finish line with no real goal in sight other than being done.
Of course those coaches were complimentary of the guy on the other bench. Why wouldn’t you want to keep somebody around you felt pretty good about beating most of the time?
But what Ole Miss coach Chris Beard said on Saturday after his Rebels lost to Missouri 83-75 was different.
“I think this is one of the best teams in the country. It’s not coachspeak. It’s what I believe,” Beard said. “Missouri has real SEC talent. They got depth. Appears to me, they got good chemistry. I know they got a great coach that’s got a good home court advantage here.”
Beard’s team jumped out to an 8-0 lead on Mizzou on Saturday. It got outscored 83-67 the rest of the way. The Rebels held on to their lead for three minutes and 54 seconds. The Tigers held theirs for 31 minutes and 52 seconds.
Beard is as qualified as anyone to talk about the country’s top teams. First of all, he’s one of college basketball’s elite coaches who has won everywhere he’s been. Second, all he’s seen for the last couple weeks are the country’s top teams. Ole Miss was 11-2 in the non-conference season, losing only to Memphis and Purdue. It rattled off four straight wins to start SEC play, including a 74-64 win over then No. 4 Alabama, handing the Crimson Tide its lone SEC loss so far. That game was on January 14th. Ole Miss hasn’t won since. It has also played the No. 15, 13 and 22 teams in the country, two of them on the road.
“This is the SEC,” Beard said. “A two-game winning streak, you know, it’s free breakfast burritos in the morning, and people want to throw you a parade. You know, a two-game losing streak, you feel like the sun won’t come up tomorrow. So it’s short term memory. It’s just staying the course. Same thing we do after wins, we just get back to work. Right now. We’re a little slide. We played three of the best teams in the country, and so it’s understandable. In this league, we just got to keep working. It’s a long season. It’s an 18-round fight.”
“Coach Beard is a great coach, and when you see a team with four straight ranked opponents on their schedule,” Mizzou head coach Dennis Gates said to open his postgame remarks. “They were able to defeat a good Alabama team at Alabama, but they lost two straight after that, we all saw the Texas A&M ending as well. Those things are tough, obviously. Coming in here, you know, we wanted to give our very best, obviously coming from the Texas game, and I thought our guys did that.”
This isn’t a column to explain to you why the sky isn’t falling in Oxford. This is a Missouri column. In that same league that has dealt Ole Miss three straight losses, Missouri is 5-2. The Tigers are tied for third with Florida, who they beat on the Gators’ home court less than two weeks ago. They lost 61-53 at Texas on Tuesday night which is less a black mark on their resume and more indicative of what happens in a conference many are calling the best in the history of college basketball.
Number one Auburn is the only team to get through six league games without a loss and needed a comeback and the benefit of the whistle to survive Tennessee on Saturday night. Kentucky is a top ten team and is .500 in league play. Texas, Georgia and Oklahoma have NCAA Tournament hopes and are a combined seven games under .500. The last place team–winless South Carolina–led Florida for 39 minutes and took Mississippi State to overtime this week. It’s brutal. And Missouri is in pretty good shape.
“The locker room at Texas, I want to credit Peyton Marshall,” Gates said. “Peyton Marshall had the loudest voice in that locker room, and he was pretty much talking as if it was me and I credit our team for listening and empowering that young man who sees the game the way that he sees it. He didn’t play at all that game, but for him to have the prescription of what happened and how we can improve before I even gotten there, and when I began to talk, he said, ‘Coach, I already said what I had to say.’ And these guys responded.”
Nobody’s story is likely to be one of perfection in SEC basketball. There are going to be bad nights and bad weeks. For everyone. That’s what happens in a league that entered Saturday with four of the top seven and 12 of the top 38 teams in the sport. Missouri hit a speed bump on Tuesday in Austin. But on Saturday, the Tigers showed it slowed them down only temporarily.
This is a team that should absolutely be setting its sights high. The Tigers have beaten Kansas, they have won at Florida, they have beaten Ole Miss. Hell, they took Texas to the wire on the road with their C game–and, yes, the Longhorns deserve some credit for forcing Missouri to play at that level.
Mizzou’s next three games are against top 15 teams. After that, there are two more ranked opponents and four road games on the schedule. Nothing is going to be easy. But the Tigers have positioned themselves almost as well as possible. A year after going winless in 19 SEC games, Missouri has proven it can go toe-to-toe with anybody in the best conference in the country. The goals cannot be set to high for this team.
“We all know about this team last year and all the adversity they had, they just kept fighting and scrapping,” Beard said. “So, you know, the DNA is here now. He’s healthy. He’s got depth. He’s got some good players. You know, there’s a reason they beat Kansas at home, and there’s a reason they’re off to a great start in the SEC. So again, congratulations to Coach Gates and Missouri.”
We should probably listen to Chris Beard. He might just know what he’s talking about.
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