In this season's RMN basketball preview, I wrote "Go ahead and brace yourselves for it. When former Colorado coach Ricardo Patton brings his Northern Illinois team to Columbia, the Tigers will be sluggish in the first half as they work through the Illinois/Christmas hangover." I know there's plenty of ambiguity there, so to clarify, what I meant is that Missouri will score the game's first seventeen points and hold a 57-17 lead at halftime.