I've said this before and I'll say it again. No group is more bi-polar than the Missouri fan base. The football team wins the biggest game in recent history on homecoming last year and suddenly we're headed to the national championship game. They go on to drop the next 2 in embarrassing fashion and suddenly we won't win another game.....ever. Pinkel is a moron, Yost is out of his element and Blaine Gabbert sucks. We had a few years when Quin Snyder was spiraling out of control where all we could muster up for the basketball team was apathy. When we got Mike Anderson I was pretty happy, but when the team made the Elite 8 run a couple of years ago, the bar was raised and Mike started dealing with the same wild mood swings that Coach Pinkel has dealt with since the 2004 season.
Now don't get me wrong. I know the season hasn't gone the way any of us wanted, but when the football Tigers dropped the inexplicable loss to Texas Tech last fall, I saw fans completely writing off the season and putting all their hopes into a basketball team that still had more questions than answers. The team put itself out there for these expectations somewhat but let's remember that these are 18-22 year old kids that have grown up thinking they're bullet proof. I've gotten a chance to talk with juco recruit Ricardo Ratliffe and think he's just a really fun young man. However I don't think Ricardo realized how much different the competition was going to be coming from a juco player of the year award into the Big XII, one of the toughest conferences in the country. Another guy that's taken a lot of heat is Kim English. All the kid's done is be the best ambassador for Missouri sports I can remember. But he's become the whipping boy for a lot of fans as he set the expectations too high his freshman year. The pressure appears to be getting to him as he accused the team of quitting after the conference tournament loss to A&M. If Kim and the other players don't learn to ignore fans expectations, then I doubt next year will be markedly better.
I don't know any way you can get kids to listen to a geezer like me, so trying to think of ways to get to the team would be hopeless. Hell, I'm not sure Coach Anderson can get to them right now. I also doubt that I can get a fan base to change it's stripes, but if I have anything to say it's just quit worrying about the destination and enjoy the ride. If the AD would determine to just concentrate on one or two sports and let everything else go to hell, those sports might well be more successful, but that just isn't going to happen, as I've discussed in a previous post. But right now we have a football team that's won 40 games in the past 4 years and a basketball team that's had the best three year run in school history. I don't worry about kids getting into major trouble and the coaches are graduating kids. To me that's pretty good. Would I love a conference title or, dare I say it, a national championship? Well hell yes, but I'm not going to base my happiness on it. Like I say, I'm going to enjoy the ride and hope we don't drive over a cliff.
