Sportsfrog.com

…for Missouri sports?

Feel free to skip this post if you’re sick of Missouri. That’s fine. And I was hoping like crazy that I’d get to type this post as the Tigers headed to their first Final Four.

But they’re not, and are now 0-5 in the Elite Eight.

At various times in the school’s history, the football and basketball teams have been successful. The 1960 football team went undefeated* (but never got a shot at the national title. Screwjob #1 in Missouri’s illustrious history) and not once in the 60s did the football team have a losing record. From 1957-1983, the football team only had a losing record three times.

When Norm Stewart got the basketball head coaching job, the team was coming off of consecutive three win seasons. That’s pretty hard to do. But over the course of Stewart’s 32 years, the Tigers won 13 conference regular season and tournament titles. However, as Stewart led the Tigers’ rise to power, the football team’s success started to sputter, as many of those winning seasons in the 70s were 7-4 and 6-5 campaigns and in the 1980s and early 1990s the team was downright awful. When Larry Smith’s 1998 football team won eight games, it was the first time since 1981 that Missouri had won eight games.

Gary Pinkel took over the football program in 2001, and promptly won nine games in his first two years, and was almost fired after going 5-6 with major–for Missouri–expectations in 2004.

And by now, everyone knows about the Quin Snyder and Ricky Clemons saga, and that Mike Anderson inherited an absolute mess when he arrived in 2006.

But now, it seems that success in both sports is finally shining down on Mizzou. The football team (despite underachieving in 2008 thanks to a supposed Chase Daniel thumb injury and a terrible defense) won 10+ games in back to back seasons for the first time ever, and Anderson took a 16-16 basketball team from 2007-2008 and turned them into an Elite Eight squad.

While it may be hard for both teams to reach their current levels next year, they both are very young, giving Missouri fans legitimate reason to be excited for both the fall and winter, and maybe, just maybe, enough of a reason to stop being so damn pessimistic.

(Oh hell, who am I kidding, you’re not a real Missouri fan unless you fear something’s about to go horribly wrong)