Mizzou women fall to Florida Gulf Coast in NCAA Tournament's opening round
Twenty minutes after the Missouri women’s basketball team lost 80-70 to Florida Gulf Coast on Saturday in the NCAA Tournament’s opening round, shock and disappointment were still settling in.
Senior Jordan Frericks at times struggled to speak. Her best friend, fellow senior Kayla Michael, cried inside her corner locker. Stacks of pizza boxes sat in the room, but no one was eating.
“You can tell it’s sad,” said junior forward Cierra Porter, who went back to sitting on the floor alone after briefly talking to reporters.
Disappointing, too. Missouri was ranked all season long but was not a national title contender. The fifth-seeded Tigers expected to make a deeper run than this though. These players declared themselves coach Robin Pingeton’s most-talented MU team ever, but they ended up as the first Tigers squad in three years not to win a NCAA Tournament game.
Missouri finished the season 24-8. The Tigers went 11-5 in the Southeastern Conference, one of the best leagues in the country, and what hurt them Saturday is that no game this season prepared them for their matchup against the No. 12 seeded Eagles.
“They just weren’t an inside, postup kind of team,” the 6-foot-4 Porter said.
None of Florida Gulf Coast’s players are even 6 feet tall. The Eagles, champions of the Atlantic Sun, are the most prolific three-point shooting team in the country — and Missouri could not do much to stop them anywhere on the court.
Mizzou only kept this game close for two reasons: Star Sophie Cunningham tied a season high with 35 points on 10-of-16 shooting from the field and 14 free throws, and the Eagles missed 14 of their 37 foul shots.
That FGCU even attempted so many free throws was part of the problem for Missouri. Foul trouble caused the Tigers to move away from their game plan.
They had hoped to force the ball inside to Porter and the 6-foot-1 Frericks, who combined to average 22 points this season. But both forwards fouled out. They each played just 17 minutes.
Frericks scored just two points in her final college game. Porter had 8 points on 4-of-9 shooting.
“It’s kind of a chess match,” Pingeton said, “and that was where we were going to maybe have an opportunity to exploit their size difference, with their bigs inside.”
Instead, Frericks and Porter picked up fouls as the Eagles regularly blew by defenders and to the rim. FGCU averaged 33.1 three-pointers per game coming into this contest, so Missouri had to aggressively close out on the perimeter to prevent those shots. But doing so came at a price.
“We gave them straight drives to the basket," Cunningham said. "And that killed us."
Florida Gulf Coast’s pace seemed to bother the Tigers, too. After saying it had spent its more than two-week-long layover from its conference tournament refining its motion offense, Missouri turned the ball over 10 times in the first half, and the Eagles scored 12 points off those giveaways.
Cunningham kept Missouri in the game by scoring 14 of the Tigers’ 21 second-quarter points. She did what MU hoped Porter and Frericks would do: She successfully posting up the smaller Eagles for layups or fouls that led to visits to the free-throw line.
But Florida Gulf Coast was going to figure out the Tigers’ plan eventually, and with about a minute left in the first half, the Eagles stole the ball from Cunningham just as she caught it inside the paint. That led to a fastbreak score that put Florida Gulf Coast up by double figures for the first time.
For all of the success Cunningham was having scoring in the paint, the Tigers still couldn’t stop Florida Gulf Coast's offense. The Eagles made 4 of 6 three-point attempts in the second quarter — two each from Jessica Cattani and China Dow.
Dow led Florida Gulf Coast with 21 points. The 5-foot-9 redshirt senior guard sped by post players when they defended her on the perimeter, and she was strong enough to regularly finish at the rim. She said she sensed the Tigers defense had “softened up” after Porter and Frericks each picked up two fouls within the game’s first 11 minutes.
“They really couldn't jump because it's risky,” Dow said. “... And we was just finishing.”
Even when Frericks and Porter returned for the second half, Cunningham was Mizzou’s only consistent source of offense. At one point during the third quarter, the junior scored seven straight points, and a Cunningham three-pointer trimmed the Florida Gulf Coast lead to five. But the Eagles responded with a three of their own to keep Mizzou at bay.
Florida Gulf Coast only made 7 threes on 17 attempts. It was just the fifth time this season that the Eagles made fewer less than eight three-pointers in a game, but they shot 53 percent on their two-point attempts.
Missouri trailed Florida Gulf Coast by at least 10 points for almost the entire fourth quarter, and the Tigers lost their third game in four tries to end the season.
A loss at Texas A&M in the Tigers' regular-season finale and an ugly defeat against Georgia in the quarterfinals round of the SEC Tournament prevented Missouri from reaching its goals of being a top-16 overall seed in the NCAA Tournament and hosting the first two rounds.
MU will return four starters next season, including Cunningham. But they lose Frericks, an All-SEC post player who was in her fifth year after missing last season because of an ACL tear.
Frericks’ return was a large reason the Tigers said they were the best team Pingeton has had at MU, one that could make a deep NCAA Tournament run. But Frericks struggled to stay on the floor on Saturday, and Missouri’s season ended earlier than anticipated.
This story was originally published March 17, 2018 at 5:39 PM with the headline "Mizzou women fall to Florida Gulf Coast in NCAA Tournament's opening round."