Serenity now: Mizzou coach Cuonzo Martin stressing benefits of peace of mind in bubble
Entering Selection Sunday for the NCAA Tournament, as ever, the prevailing mystery was which schools on the bubble would be granted a berth.
Now, though, it’s all about which teams can best navigate and optimize the disorienting life in the bubble in Indiana, where the entire tournament is being played to minimize hazards posed by the pandemic.
Foremost, that means being healthy enough to actually be able to play, a challenge that surged at Kansas last week and resulted in three players not traveling with the team on Monday due to a COVID-19 positive case within the program. Meanwhile, the entire Virginia team is unable to travel to Indianapolis until at least Friday as the question looms of whether it will even be able to take part.
More mundanely in every sense of the term, though, is what teams make the most of the rare gift of time that may be obscured by a persistent sense of tedium, isolation and numbing repetition.
To which Mizzou Cuonzo Martin basically is saying … serenity now. Because for everything else MU and others can or can’t do right now, he considers this an opportunity to achieve “peace of mind” from the anxieties and pressures of the season.
With that comes the chance to get physical and mental rest conducive to zeroing in on the attention to detail, or lack thereof, that has distinguished the stages of Mizzou’s season as it pursues its first NCAA Tournament victory since 2010.
Without the typical surrounding fanfare that tends to distract, he figures, these circumstances favor harnessing a keener focus and fostering cleaner minds on a team that lost six of the last nine coming into its tournament opener against Oklahoma on Saturday at Lucas Oil Stadium.
Call it touchy-feely stuff if you’d like, but state of mind figures to be pivotal in a team that before this funk had beaten three top 10 teams and went 9-4 against the NCAA Tournament field.
When I asked him about how to achieve that ideal state between cool poise and appropriate excitement, he made the point that he believes players tend to be at their best when unencumbered by pressure or fear.
“It’s not as if the opponent has a weapon on the court, so it’s just basketball,” he said.
Accordingly, a missed shot is a missed shot but shouldn’t make any difference if you “consume yourself with defending, rebounding and playing as hard as you can play and not letting distractions” during the game “cause you to do something out of character.”
More broadly, that includes adjusting to the runup now, when everything is out of character from how it normally might be.
(In that sense, maybe this hurts MU less than others since the Tigers are in the NCAA Tournament for the first time since 2018 and only one player, Jeremiah Tilmon, previously has appeared in an NCAA tourney game.)
Sure, it’s for a limited time only. And there’s nothing to pity about players who have their own rooms in cushy hotels so they can get to play basketball.
But the question here isn’t about quality of life, especially in a world with so much devastation and suffering from the pandemic.
The question is about who will prosper and who will be diminished in the tournament by these days.
Most directly, it’s about how harnessing the grind might play into a mindset by the time it begins with the First Four on Thursday featuring 11th-seeded Wichita State against No. 11 seed Drake in the West Region.
Also in the West beginning play on Saturday are third-seeded Kansas, taking on 14th-seeded Eastern Washington, and ninth-seeded Missouri up against eighth-seeded Oklahoma.
Each team has its own internal team dynamics, of course, and each coach might have his own approach. We’ll probably only know in hindsight who handled it best, which may or may not be the same as simply testimony to the best teams going the farthest.
But KU coach Bill Self was onto something the other day when he essentially embraced just being in this rugged region topped by overall No. 1 seed Gonzaga.
“Since that’s the draw we got,” he said, “I might as well be comfortable with it and like it.”
While Martin has determined to see this situation as ideal in some ways, he gets that players may see it otherwise. Part of his task is to nonetheless convince them that this is good medicine even if it doesn’t go down easy.
“I mean, they’ve got us in a room 24-7. We can’t leave. So I’m not looking forward to that at all,” Tilmon, perhaps MU’s greatest variable said, smiling. But I’m going to do what I’ve got to do to make sure I stay safe.”
Since he said that Sunday evening from the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, a de facto holding area for teams that had arrived early, the team went on to get COVID testing and arrive in hotel rooms about 10:30 or 11 on Sunday night.
Among the items each had waiting for them was a puzzle and late basketball legend John Thompson’s book, “I Came As A Shadow.” But senior Dru Smith didn’t mention those when he was asked how players are connecting during their considerable down time.
Instead, he said, most brought their XBox or PlayStation and are “able to talk to everybody through there” via headsets.
Good thing they have that, since under protocols they aren’t even hanging out in each other’s rooms on the same floor of their hotel.
Other than that, well, they typically eat as a group, get tested, lift weights, practice at the Indianapolis Convention Center and watch film at night.
Rinse, repeat.
“You have a lot of time to get stuff done, because you don’t have all the other stuff that (usually) goes with it,” Martin said, later adding, “It’s just you and your team.”
For better or for worse, managing that will be a key part of the difference between staying wrapped in the bubble or bursting from it in the days to come.