Apathetic after a dismal decade, Missouri Tigers men’s basketball fans ready for change
Ravi Dasari and his friends used to plan their schedules around Missouri Tigers men’s basketball games.
A 1983 graduate of the university, donor and active member of the KC Tiger Club fan group, he’s been a season ticket holder for over four decades. He and his friends would regularly make the drive to Columbia from Kansas City — two hours there and two hours back — just to see Mizzou play. If they couldn’t make it, you could bet they’d have the action on for watch parties.
But these days, amid a dismal decade for the program capped off by a 21-loss season this year, most of that group doesn’t even know when games are on. Ask many other Mizzou fans and they’ll say the same.
“Apathy is worse than disappointment, anger and frustration,” Dasari said, “and our fans are apathetic.”
The Star spoke at length with nearly a dozen Mizzou fans, from casual to die-hard, ranging from ages 23 to 80, to get their thoughts on the state of the men’s basketball program and the future of Cuonzo Martin ahead of Friday’s news that he will not return as men’s basketball coach with two years remaining on his contract.
Nearly everyone brought up apathy in one form or another.
“I think the passion is still there, but people are just beat down by the lack of success,” said Dan Kuester, a 50-year old lifelong Mizzou fan and Ph.D. graduate who is now an economics professor at Kansas State. “... It’s kind of sad to see how everything’s kind of fallen apart.”
Most reasonable Missouri fans will tell you they don’t expect to consistently compete at the level of historic programs like Duke or Kentucky. The Tigers don’t have a national championship or even a Final Four to their name through 116 seasons. But the program has had its highs, like 15 regular-season conference championships, eight conference tournament championships and a handful of NCAA Tournament Elite Eight appearances.
Any of that success has been nonexistent over the past decade or so. Since the start of the 2012-13 season, Missouri has only won 47% of its games. Six of the last 10 seasons have ended with a winning percentage under .500 — three under Martin and three under Kim Anderson. It’s the worst decade-long stretch for the program, in terms of winning percentage, in nearly half a century.
“Quite frankly, it’s really sad,” said Ben Blackman, a 37-year-old Mizzou alum who grew up around the basketball program and with his father is on the board of directors for the KC Tiger Club. “It’s a bit embarrassing too, I must say. I pride myself on being an extremely loyal person in general and I believe that I’m an extremely loyal fan. … If somebody like me who is as die-hard as they come is no longer willing to invest all my time and energy into Missouri basketball, then I can’t imagine what it’s like for kind of a casual fan.”
It wasn’t supposed to go this way. When Missouri left the Big 12 to join the SEC in 2012, most fans knew a challenge lay ahead on the football field. But with basketball, they expected to be among the best.
“Looking back at it, it might sound silly, but honestly I would have thought, like it felt like it was gonna be Kentucky, Mizzou and then everyone else fighting behind us,” said Brett Sarver, a 27-year-old driver for FedEx who has been a fan of the program since his family moved to Missouri when he was in elementary school. “To see it just work out in such a different way as everyone else around us has improved and just kind of poured into the programs .... to see us just absolutely bottom out and not make tournaments for years, it’s not been a fun time.”
The Tigers are 63-115 in conference games since joining the SEC — winning a mere 35.4%. The team’s best finish was fourth place, in the first year under Martin, and the average finish has been towards the bottom of the 14-team league in 10th place. In five of 10 seasons, the Tigers have been at the very bottom between 12th and 14th place — two times under Martin.
The last eight seasons, since Frank Haith left for Tulsa, have been even worse. The team is 104-144 overall and has won less than a third of its conference games (30.3%).
“If you talked to a lot of Missouri fans at the time when the Tigers were gonna make the move to Southeastern Conference, from a basketball side, I think everyone thought Missouri was gonna do really well for itself,” said Edward Burns, a 2003 graduate who covered the program for the Columbia Missourian when Quin Snyder was coach. “They’ve gone completely the other direction. And meanwhile a lot of programs in the Southeastern Conference have totally stepped up their game.”
That’s part of what makes this even more painful for fans. Schools lacking much of a history in basketball like Alabama and Auburn have turned around their programs under new coaches. Arkansas has thrived under head coach Eric Musselman. And even the teams that haven’t been great have just been better than Mizzou.
There was a renewed sense of hope for some in 2017. Martin had just been hired as head coach and brought in five-star recruit Michael Porter Jr. and four-stars Jontay Porter and Jeremiah Tilmon. Many who had shut themselves away from the team during the painful Anderson years came back into the fold, buying season tickets with optimism that the program could get back on track.
“We sold out Mizzou Arena before the season started because of the Porters and Tilmon,” Dasari said. “That’s emotional because nobody saw the product becoming a good product. It was just anticipation.”
Of course, that season didn’t go as planned because of injuries; the same can be said for the next. Since the start of 2018-19, Martin and the Tigers are 58-64 (25-45 SEC) and made just one more NCAA Tournament appearance — and many consider that 2020-21 season an underachievement. The team was ranked in the top 10 of the AP poll before a collapse down the stretch.
“Cuonzo’s had a lot of unfortunate breaks,” Kuester said. “But unfortunately to me, I think the reasons aren’t as important as the trajectory of the program and where we’re going to go.”
That brings us to this past season, the worst — by far — under Martin. In fact, it’s one of only six 20-loss seasons in school history, four of which have come over the past decade.
Once the team lost to UMKC — which finished fourth in the Summit League — in the second game, Mizzou Arena was practically empty for most home games. As the season and losses continued, more and more fans checked out. Many said it was just too painful.
The average attendance for Mizzou Arena at home games — which is calculated by the athletic department based on tickets sold, not people in seats — was listed at the full capacity of the building (15,061) in Martin’s first season. It’s been a steady decline since. The average attendance listed by the athletic department this season was 6,168, though there weren’t nearly that many people in the seats.
“Watching TV, seeing how empty Mizzou Arena is, it’s just stunning,” Burns said. “It was never like that when I was there. Just to see how …empty the arena is, you can see the yellow backs of the seats. That just kind of sticks with you a little bit.”
The Tigers were routinely played off the court as they suffered seven losses of at least 20 points, the most in a season since 1965-66 and tied for most in program history. The games that were competitive mostly followed the same script: turnovers, lack of offense, defensive breakdowns and bad execution let victories slip away.
“Personally, I watched just about as many games as I could,” said Philip Bland, a 2014 graduate and lifelong Mizzou fan who grew up in Roeland Park, Kansas. “I’ve kind of stopped watching over the past couple of weeks or so just because I wasn’t really seeing any improvement on the floor from the team. … I just kind of tired of watching it over and over again.”
The majority of fans The Star spoke with said they believed it was time for the school to move on from Martin. But nearly everyone prefaced it by saying they feel bad for feeling that way because they admire who Martin is as a person.
“I am firmly in the camp that I believe Missouri needs to move in another direction,” Blackman said. “I think Cuonzo is a fantastic person. I don’t think there’s a single person out there, whether it be a fan or opposing coaches, they would say otherwise. I’ve never heard anybody speak ill of the man. But that doesn’t cut it when you have (university president) Dr. Mun Choi and (athletics director) Desiree Reed-Francois telling the fan base in no uncertain terms that their standard is to compete for championships. And they’re nowhere close with Cuonzo Martin.”
“I like Cuonzo as a person,” Bland added. “I think he’s a great leader of young men, but the way the program has gone since — I mean, he’s definitely helped revive it and kind of raise the floor, but at this point, middle to the bottom of the SEC isn’t really what I think Mizzou as a program could be.”
Another issue for fans has been the lack of recruiting success. In addition to the lack of on court results, the Tigers have landed one four-star recruit since 2017, while coming up short on players such as EJ Lidell (Ohio State), Courtney Ramey (Texas) and Caleb Love (UNC). Others like Columbia natives Kansas’ Dajuan Harris and Missouri State’s Isiaih Mosley have gone on the record saying they weren’t heavily recruited by Martin and his staff.
“At some point, even if I think Cuonzo’s a pretty good X’s and O’s coach and somebody who I love to see representing my program, he’s ultimately responsible for the state of the roster,” said Adam Reckamp, a recent graduate who covered the team in 2019-20. “I think that if anything that’s going to be what gets him fired is the roster. They just don’t have enough talent and he’s the person in charge of making sure they have enough talent.”
This story was originally published March 11, 2022 at 5:00 AM.
