Just some basketball odds and ends

We are truly in the dog days of summer. It’s cooler in Missouri — hurray for cold fronts! — but the content well is still dry as hell. Luckily, we’ve got a few basketball bits and pieces to sate your appetite!

• Mizzou Hoops confirmed another non-conference game this fall, one in Dennis’ Gates old backyard. The Tigers will take on Central Florida on Dec. 17 in the single-game Orange Bowl Basketball Classic.
• Coach Gates spoke with Jon Rothstein for the latter’s podcast, “College Hoops Today.” Here’s the link if you want to give it a listen.
• At the Kansas City Star, Nathan Han wrote about Dennis Gates as X’s and O’s coach — something you could also read on our site (in greater depth, I may add!)
• Thanks to Basketball Matt (no, the other one) for highlighting this Mohamed Diarra footage that was shuttling around the back channels of Twitter this weekend.

• If you’re a KenPom subscriber, you may have seen that ole KP dropped his updated program rankings using data from 1997-2022. Any guesses where Mizzou sits? It may be lower than you think!
• Phil Pressey spoke with Ben Arnet at KOMU about his return to Columbia and what he’s excited about in this new career challenge.

Yesterday at Rock M

• In which our football writers discuss Mizzou’s offensive line, which needs some youth reinforcements to take a leap in 2022

More Links:

Funny enough, there isn’t much more to highlight today, so the below gets its own section!

I wanted to start off my highlighting this tweet from Mizzou basketball player Skylah Travis from a few days ago.

In case you’re in the “not reading all that” crew, here’s the TL;DR: Travis is medically retiring after a long series of injuries and mental health diagnoses. Opening up about these sorts of things is incredibly cool as it helps fight the stigma that things like depression, anxiety, etc. are a vulnerability or weakness rather than a medical condition that needs treatment.

Here’s to rooting for Travis to finish her college years strong and achieve all of her ambitions off the court!

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