For the third time in the past four seasons, the Missouri men’s basketball team is starting to dance.
The Tigers are the No. 10 seed in the West Region of the NCAA Tournament and will face the Miami Hurricanes in the first round in St. Louis on Friday.
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If Missouri advances, it will face the winner of the game between second-seeded Purdue and 15th-seeded Queens.
MU has some big ties to Miami. Hurricanes associate head coach Charlton “CY” Young spent his first three seasons in Columbia under Dennis Gates, and Miami also has former Tiger Marcus Allen on its roster.
Two players who could end up playing key roles in this game, Missouri’s Anthony Robinson II and the Hurricanes’ Trey Donaldson, are teammates at Florida State University High School in Tallahassee.
“There’s similarities, there’s familiarity, there’s a relationship,” Gates said. “They’re both being coached by a great coach in Jay Lucas.”
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MU enters March Madness with a 20-12 record and is 10-8 against SEC play in the regular season. The Tigers have lost three straight games in the first week of the Big Dance, most recently a 78-72 loss to Kentucky in the second round of the conference tournament.
But Mizzou’s wins against top teams, including Florida and Vanderbilt, combined with its ranking in the key metric of record strength and its wins above the bubble compared to other teams closer to the line, put Michigan in a pretty solid position heading into Sunday’s selection.
The Tigers have lost to Arkansas and Kentucky over the past two weeks, but also had narrow wins over several tournament teams including Tennessee, Texas A&M and the Commodores during a strong performance in February.
“The characteristics that we learned, the lessons that we learned, are really important to my team, to my guys, that will help you guys in the playoffs,” Gates said when asked about his team’s hot-and-cold streak over the past two months. “That’s what I want to reveal, is being able to win close games, being able to adapt. That’s the most important thing.”
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Thanks in large part to that win over an SEC opponent in February, several of Missouri’s starters will be making their first appearance in the NCAA Tournament.
“There’s a couple guys who have never played before; Jayden Stone has never played, Shawn Phillips Jr. has never played, so those guys, and certainly our freshmen, they’re going to have the experience of a lifetime,” Gates said. “One of the shining moments is the national anthem, that’s one of the things we talked about at the beginning of the season when we got together and just got to know the best about each other, so that’s exciting.”
The Tigers’ bid this season gives them back-to-back NCAA tournament appearances for the first time since Frank Haith’s 2011-12 and 2012-13 seasons. This is also the first time in four years that the University of Missouri has received a bid to host the March Madness tournament, since five consecutive March Madness appearances from 2008-09 to 2012-13 (during the tenures of Hayes and Mike Anderson).
