Taking a night to think on this a bit more is good for my mental health.
Watching Mizzou basketball over the years is not something I would recommend as a fix for any mental health ailments, mind you. Most
sporting events, if you have fandom on the line, are a tough watch. And this game was a very tough watch. Missouri was only favored by a possession to start the game, so you’re in a virtual toss up. And then you consider the Tigers have yet to really play anyone with a pulse, and yeah this game was going to be tough on the nerves.
I like what Micah Shrewsbury is building in South Bend. He’s got the framework of a good roster, and some high end talent. They’re not quite a finished product, but no doubt will use this game as a springboard for the rest of their season. They nearly beat Ohio State, fought tooth and nail against Kansas and Houston. And then caught their win against Missouri.
For the Tigers? They’re also not a finished product. In their first game against against a team with a pulse, you can see all the things they want to be, but aren’t yet.
If there’s any good news is that the rest of the SEC looks pretty bad, as well! On the first night the league went 3-6 against the ACC with wins from Oklahoma over Wake Forest, Texas A&M over Pitt, and Georgia over Florida State. Things went better last night, but there were some favorable matchups, and LSU needed overtime to beat a bad Boston College team.
Against Notre Dame, Missouri didn’t play well. They struggled to make shots in the half court, and anyone not named Mark Mitchell or Jacob Crews was basically a sieve offensively. All that happened and they still had a chance to win the game.
TEAM STATS
Missouri jumped out to a 12 point lead in the first half largely by forcing turnovers and converting easy baskets. Notre Dame had 10 turnovers in the first half, and just three in the second half. When they weren’t getting in transition, they were fighting uphill to convert in the half court. Their 2FGA% was the lowest of the season. And if you’re not banging in threes on top of that, scoring gets a bit difficult. Only two players made threes and one of them was Mark Mitchell. It was that kind of night.
- Mizzou largely got the offensive performance from the Irish they needed, until it got to the second half. ND shot 7 of 15 from deep in the second half.
- Lost two of the three categories in BCI, just stole the ball more. I swear Missouri is turning the ball over way more often than they have in the past and yep, they’re still around 19% on the season. They had 7 second half turnovers including two in the last five minutes. Just very un-Gates like.
The rebounding was a draw essentially. Mizzou did well enough to keep the Irish off the glass, but didn’t collect much of their own. They basically won three of the four factors. They won the FTA battle, but only by a couple makes. They edged out the rebounding, and narrowly won turnovers. But they lost shooting, and by a good margin.
INDIVIDUAL STATS
Trifecta: Mark Mitchell, Jacob Crews, T.O. Barrett
On the season: Mark Mitchell 19, Jacob Crews 13, Jayden Stone 7, Anthony Robinson 6, Shawn Phillips Jr. 4, Jevon Porter 3, T.O. Barrett, Annor Boateng 1
The only reason Missouri was even in this game is because Mark Mitchell was Mark Mitchell, and Jacob Crews stepped up big as well.
All Missouri needed was one more guy to have a good performance offensively. Not to disrespect T.O Barrett, who played his best game in a while. But TO isn’t an offensive cog at this point. This is where not having Jayden Stone and Trent Pierce really hurts them. They just needed one guy more.
The Offensive Ratings are completely brutal. We often talk about wanting to have multiple players with a Floor Rate (the likelihood the team scores at least a point when a player uses a possession) north of 40% being a good indicator of scoring success by the team. And T.O. was terrific with 70%, but with just 8.8% usage. Mark was solid, but at SUPER HIGH usage (anything north of 30% is a lot). Crews was terrific and right about where you’d want him, with maybe his minutes a little higher than expected, but he was playing well so you leave him out there.
This brings me to Anthony Robinson… Ant has been awful for three games now. His defense is alwasy good, and without steals his offense would be even worse. In his last three, Ant is 1-10 from 3FG, 5-9 from 2FG, and he’s only attempted 2 free throws. He’s also committed 13 fouls. It’s possible to go through a funk offensively every once in a while, even for a good to great player. The two most concerning trends here are a lack of drawing fouls, and his shrinking usage rate. All last season Ant averaged a 21.4% usage rate and he needed that number to go UP this season for Missouri to realize their ceiling. Instead, everything has gone down. Shooting, free throw attempts, fouls drawn. Meanwhile his turnovers are up.
I don’t know what the answer is here, but Missouri needs Anthony Robinson to play like he’s capable of. He needs to shoulder more of an offensive load, and do so with some level of efficiency. He’s still able to impact the game in other ways, against Notre Dame he had 7 rebounds, 3 assists and 5 steals. But Mizzou needs him to do that plus score the ball.
Two other quick comments and then I’ll bow out. The officiating was awful. There were two techs called and whenever a coach gets one they usually earn it, and do so on purpose. But the technical on Crews screamed the official was leaning on his own ego. I know they also missed a shuffling of the feet on the pass that led to NDs game winning three, but that didn’t bother me. The rest of the game was just so questionably called, I can understand some player (on both sides) frustration with trying to figure out how to play. Officiating is tough, it’s why I’m usually leinient on the refs, but they were as bad as they’ve been all year in this game.
Winning on the road is difficult to do. Losing this game is no greater indicator for Missouri’s season than Tennessee losing at Syracuse, or Louisville losing at Arkansas. The ACC-SEC Challenge was split 9-9, but across the board the SEC underperformed the margin. The league looks shaky, and open for the taking for any team who can put together a run. This is also why I think Missouri did itself a disservice by playing such a soft early non-conference schedule. Any effort to play a tougher game away from Mizzou Arena likely would have set them up for better success when facing a quality, but not great, Notre Dame team.
There’s nothing you can do about it now, however. Hopefully this is a learning experience at a lot of different levels and Missouri can go beat Kansas on Sunday.
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!
