For Mizzou Basketball to live up to hype, where do the Tigers need to improve the most?

It’s become something of an annual tradition: my collection of the “ifs” it will take for Mizzou Football to reach different sets of goals. This year’s “ifs” post is forthcoming ... but Mizzou Basketball continues to butt its way into the football preseason, and after Jontay Porter’s decision to reclassify as a 2017-18 freshman, I figured we should start on the hoops side.

Before we get to the ifs, though, we have to figure out how to set some standards. We know that Missouri is going to begin the season with some of the best odds in the country at winning the national title. They were the eighth-best odds before Jontay’s move, so if there’s any further shift, it will be in the Tigers’ favor.

Since the Tiger roster has been overhauled both in terms of new bodies and raw talent, and since this whole “from eight wins to national title contender in a single offseason” thing is unprecedented, it’s really difficult to simply say, “For Mizzou to live up to hype, the Tigers have to improve in Categories A and B.” They have to improve in virtually every way.

To set standards, then, let’s create a generic Very Good Team.

To do this, I looked at the teams that reached the Elite Eight over the past five years — Mizzou has top-eight odds, and all — and looked at their basic KenPom rankings. You can play with that data here:

As one would expect, to make the Elite Eight, you have to be good overall and good at a lot of things.

• 27 of 40 teams were in the overall KenPom top 10.
• 26 were in the top 15 in offensive efficiency
• 24 were in the top 20 in defensive efficiency

Rocket science here, I know. But how those teams got to those lofty rankings varied from team to team. To create a Good Mizzou Team, then, we’ll simply take the median rankings from each category, figure out what value those rankings would have translated to last year (like, if the median ranking for eFG% was 46, what percentage ranked 46th last year?), and figure out how much Mizzou needs to improve to hit those targets.

Once we’re done with this exercise, we can in a future post ascribe “ifs” to the current roster for reaching those targets.

First, the basics:

• Median overall ranking for Elite 8 team, 2013-17: 6.5 (Approximate value: +27.3 | Mizzou last year: +2.3)
• Median offensive ranking: 12.5 (Approximate value: 121.5 | Mizzou last year: 101.5)
• Median defensive ranking: 17.0 (Approximate value: 93.2 | Mizzou last year: 100.9)

Without getting into what those terms mean, you can at least see that Mizzou needs to improve on both sides of the court but requires a little bit more of a boost on offense (20.0 points per 100 possessions) than on defense (7.7 points per 100 possessions).

So let’s get into the nitty gritty.

Mizzou’s eFG% needs to improve by 8.5% — easily the most drastic required change — and its offensive rebound rate needs to rise by 4.1%. Meanwhile, the Tigers already hit the mark or came close in terms of turnover rate and fouls drawn.

This is good news when you think about what Cuonzo Martin has most directly added with his first recruiting class: scoring ability and size.

What about the defense?

On defense, Mizzou needs to limit opponents’ eFG% by an extra 2.1% and needs to cut opponents’ rebound rate by 2.3%; the Tigers need to keep forcing turnovers at their current rate, and more than anything else, they need to figure out how not to foul so damn much.

Obviously the addition of Jeremiah Tilmon and the Porter brothers dramatically increases Mizzou’s length, which should help directly on the glass and indirectly in FG% defense (it’s hard to shoot over taller people, right?). But considering what Mizzou’s working with — a foul-prone guard in Terrence Phillips and a lot of young big men who might get caught out of position a lot — there’s no guarantee the foul situation will improve.

Granted, awful-shooting, foul-prone South Carolina’s Final Four run last year proved that you can be deficient in a couple of areas if you master others (like, in the Cocks’ case, FG% defense and forcing turnovers). But this sets the bar for improvement in appropriate areas, I think.