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Missouri isn’t a team deep in Senior talent this year. But they’ve got one. His name is Reed Nikko, he’s a Fisheries and Wildlife major, and we call him Big ‘Sota.
The 2019-20 Nonconference Schedule.
— Mizzou Hoops (@MizzouHoops) August 6, 2019
Presented by @ReedNikko in Nature. #ToTheFinishLine pic.twitter.com/2zgTbRIrIu
I love this as a fun and unique way to unveil the schedule. I also got an email from MU Athletics with a press release which was decidedly less fun but still informative.
Let’s jump to the teams (we’ll have a more thorough breakdown in the coming days but at least we can jump start the conversations now):
- Wed. Nov. 6 – HOME vs. Incarnate Word
- Fri. Nov. 8 - HOME vs. Northern Kentucky
- Tue. Nov. 12 – AWAY vs. Xavier
- Mon. Nov. 18 – HOME vs. Wofford
- Wed. Nov. 20 – HOME vs. Morehead State
- Hall of Fame Classic at Sprint Center in KC: Mon. Nov. 25 – vs. Butler
- Hall of Fame Classic at Sprint Center in KC: Tue. Nov. 26 – vs. Oklahoma OR Stanford
- Tue. Dec. 3 – HOME vs. Charleston Southern
- Sat. Dec. 7 – AWAY vs Temple
- Sun. Dec. 15 – HOME vs. SIUC
- Braggin’ Rights at Enterprise Center in STL: Sat. Dec. 21 - vs. Illinois
- Mon. Dec. 30 – HOME vs. Chicago State
- Sat. Jan. 25 – AWAY vs. West Virginia
By my count, there are 13 games overall, seven games they should win at home, leaving six in the road/tossup category. To be a strong tournament threat, they probably need to win at least three of those and get to 10-3 in the non-conference. I think you can easily get there by splitting your Hall of Fame Classic games while taking down Temple and either Xavier or Illinois.
As I said above, we’ll dive deeper into each opponent in the coming days to figure out which of those games is the most likely based upon rosters. Then we’ll try and project where this team might be. I don’t want to do a listing of each team’s KenPom rating from last year because it could be misleading to what they have this season. Context is important. But if things do go well for the Tigers, there are enough winnable road games against Tier1 or Tier2 level teams for Martin and his bunch to put together a pretty iron clad NCAA resume.