I pretty much quit paying attention to basketball during the last 3 years or so of the Quin Snyder era. Talk about an unmitigated fucking disaster. He was considered to be the next "can't miss" guy by most of the pundits and frankly a whole lot of Missouri fans, including myself. To watch him gradually circle the drain following the Ricky Clemon's episode, along with my enthusiasm for the program was disheartening to say the least. But we did get a really nice arena out of the deal I guess.
The first couple of years was tough for Anderson as he had to work with kids he'd not recruited and didn't have the sort of discipline and dedication you need to succeed in his "Fastest 40 minutes of basketball" system. Unexpected losses, player altercations and a general belief that Anderson would never be able to get it done marred those first 2 seasons. Then in year 3 it came together for him and his team as transfer and nephew Demarre Carrol and former Quin recruit Leo Lyons led the Tigers to the Big 12 tournament title, a 3rd seed in the tournament and an elite 8 finish. Losing those 2 players plus fellow graduate Matt Lawrence made most of the experts again doubt Coach and the team was picked 7th in the league pre-season with little chance to be successful. However, all that prevented them from another top 4 finish was an injury to junior Justin Safford which contributed to a late season swoon. They did manage to notch one win at the dance before falling last Sunday to a good West Virginia team coached by that bastion of virtue, Bob Huggins, who was considered for the job when Anderson was hired.
The future looks bright for the Tigers again. A good portion of this years team were just sophomores and he's bringing in his best recruiting class to date including high flyer Tony Mitchell and point guard Phil Pressey, son of his lifelong friend and college room mate and former NBA player Paul Pressey. While Coach Anderson may never enjoy a stretch of league titles that Coach Stewart did, his system is built for the NCAA tournament and I firmly believe Missouri's first final 4 appearance will occur sooner than later. Between he and Gary Pinkel, people are finally realizing that Mike Alden is a pretty damn good judge of coaches when he's not also being charged with finding 25 million dollars for a new arena.
A few things to talk about concerning spring football and that's what I'll be getting to next time. Have a good week.
Merlin, Thanks for your comment on my Bigfoot post. It WAS an April Fool's prank, and I actually posted it today. But since I started the message last night and saved it, it had a 3/31 date when I posted it today. I have corrected the date by simply deleting that original post and creating a new and identical post (which has today's date). In that process, your comment was deleted, but that was the only way to fix the date problem.
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