Mizzou is actually good... when they’re good.

An interesting chart was provided by Jordan Sperber, who has an awesome column at HoopVision on Substack... you can subscribe and if you think you like basketball as much as Matt and I do, I recommend signing up for it. Here’s his tweet.

The chart in the picture is a graph of all the division one teams mapped based upon whether they are Consistently Bad, Consistently Good, Inconsistently Bad, and Inconsistently Good. Missouri is right where you’d expect them...

While they aren’t as inconsistently good as Purdue (who is weirdly enough the best team in the country if you only count their wins), Missouri is very good when they’re good. The problem is consistency.

If you look at Missouri’s Team Page on BartTorvik.com, he has a chart which might help explain this phenomenon. He has a trend stat graph where he calculates the Game Score for each game. The higher the score the better the performance. Missouri has had 10 games with a game score of 88 or higher (these are considered very good performances). Mizzou has just lost just one of those games, their last one against LSU. Here are their Game Score ranges:

• 90+: 6-0 (Incarnate Word, NKU, SIU, Illinois, Chicago State, Florida)
• 80-89: 3-1 (Wofford, Temple, Arkansas, LSU)
• 70-79: 1-1 (Morehead State, Xavier)
• 60-69: 0-1 (Kentucky)
• 50-59: 1-1 (Alabama, Georgia)
• 40-49: 0-3 (Oklahoma, Tennessee, West Virginia)
• 30-39: 0-2 (Butler, Texas A&M (H))
• 20-29: 0-0
• 10-19: 0-2 (South Carolina, Texas A&M (A))
• 0-9: 0-2 (Charleston Southern, Miss State)

This seems like common sense to a degree, when you play well you are more likely to win, but there are 9 games of game scores under 50 points, and 12 games below a score of 70. The bottom 9 they’re winless, under 70 and they’re 1-11 with their lone win against the 317th ranked team in the country.

Do you know how many games LSU has under 70? Four

How about Kentucky? Four

Auburn? The opponent today? Five times. Their lowest rating was a 23 against Florida, the others, a 41 against Alabama, and everything else in the 60s and up.

Missouri has had four performances worse than Auburns lone bad performance. Even Vanderbilt has only had two performances as bad as Missouri’s four clunkers. The difference is Vandy has two performances in the 90s and Mizzou has SIX.

A problem might be Auburn. They have 11 games of 90+.

It’s a fascinating exercise, and frustrating. If Cuonzo Martin and his program can find consistency they can start to build back the excitement.