Blum: Mizzou basketball's baffling blowout by Kansas City raises major questions

Missouri men's basketball's season opener last week showed some signs of promise.

The Tigers presented a team with a relentless offensive approach and a tenacity to dive for loose balls and not be outworked while on defense.

None of that showed up Monday night in the Tigers' second game of the season, an incredulous 80-66 loss to Kansas City at Mizzou Arena.

"I hope our guys don't just brush this under the rug," said Missouri junior Kobe Brown, who led the Tigers with 20 points. "I hope we learn from this. I don't want them to just let it clear their mind. I hope they think about it for tonight, tomorrow, and then we move on to the next game.

"But I don't want them to forget this."

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Missouri's last lead in the game stood with 16:35 left in the first half, as a layup by Roos guard Marvin Nesbitt Jr. brought UMKC's lead to 7-6.

The Tigers trailed by double digits for the game's final 15:28 after Sam Martin made a layup of his own for the Roos.

Martin, who's the cousin of Kansas City Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes, also got to be part of a team that dazzled for Missouri's most populous city, for one night, just like his Super Bowl-winning, MVP-laden family member.

The game wasn't close. It's not a ruse to say the Roos outclassed Missouri. And no one in Columbia saw the smackdown coming in a "buy game," a term used in college athletics to denote paying an opponent to play you at home, just so you can win and get better at their expense.

The Roos got their cake and ate it, too. Then they went back for some cookies and ice cream for good measure in the name of 18 Tiger turnovers.

A UMKC team that came into the game winless, with a 15-point loss to Minnesota and a 32-point blowout to Iowa on its resume, thoroughly beat the Tigers.

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A satellite UM System school's team just outclassed the flagship campus' best. This loss could foreshadow a long Missouri season with almost 30 more games remaining.

Those in and around the Tigers, as well as a heavy majority of the 6,887 fans in attendance for the in-state game, feel like they were jump-kicked to the ground by the Roos.

"I've seen these before, and I said to our guys in our practice yesterday, and even earlier today at our shootaround, 'Respect all and fear none,'" MU head coach Cuonzo Martin said. "Because it's important that people are trying to beat you. This is not casual basketball. So you respect your opponent because anybody can beat you, because oftentimes as a coach, you can see these things coming.

"You try to spend a lot of time with your guys working on tough stuff, gritty stuff, fighting through screens, boxing out, all those tough things to prepare for this. But oftentimes, there's painful lessons you have to go through. We went through it."

Martin said he didn't sense a loss was imminent to the Roos because of how his team competed in the lead-up to the game, but he maintained the Tigers weren't assertive enough against UMKC.

The 2021-22 version of Missouri was always going to need time to reach its ideal chemistry, and turbulence was to be expected to some extent.

A major wake-up call in game No. 2 of the year wasn't exactly the stumble MU was expecting, however. It was the third loss in the Cuonzo Martin era to a team from outside college basketball's five high-major conferences, with a 2018 loss to Temple and a 2019 defeat to Charleston Southern representing the other two.

Monday's loss was eerily similar to game No. 1 of the Kim Anderson era, nearly seven years to the day, a 69-61 loss to UMKC.

The 2014-15 team ended up 9-23 and won only three Southeastern Conference games. The current roster should still be able to reach double-digit wins on the season despite Monday's faceplant.

Roos guard Evan Gilyard II led all scorers with 28 points. He was 10 of 15 from the floor, including 6-for-8 from 3-point range.

One of Gilyard's high school teammates at Simeon High School in Chicago was former Tiger Xavier Pinson. Gilyard's performance Monday resembled how the now-LSU guard tore through opposition for Missouri right before the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, with clutch perimeter shooting and an unmatched motor to get to the rim.

The Tigers didn't match that effort in the deflating loss.

"It'll certainly help us because it's a painful lesson," Martin said about the Tigers moving forward. "You've got to understand it, go through it, watch the film on it, because I think our guys will see.

"It always starts with me as a coach, and I think our guys will see the effort in which we did not operate with. And that's one of the things I think we take pride in. You didn't have it consistently. And then you allow a young man (Gilyard) to make plays at the rim the whole night. That can't happen, especially with things we go over all the time. When you go over certain things, you expect (they) shouldn't happen because he did a tremendous job of getting to the rim with his left hand, which was one of the things we wanted to take away."

Offensively, Missouri didn't have the structure it needed to make a legitimate comeback attempt.

Part of that was an injury to Boogie Coleman, who appeared to roll an ankle with 17:05 left in the game and didn't return. Martin didn't have an update after the game about Coleman's status.

The Tigers' next game is Thursday at home against Northern Illinois.

Without Coleman, arguably the Tigers' best option at point guard, MU had trouble setting up its offense.

Monday was also the first time in the Cuonzo Martin era where a player 6-foot-10 or taller didn't start the game. The team's two players meeting that vertical threshold, 7-foot-3 Jordan Wilmore and 6-foot-11 Yaya Keita, combined to play 9:44 of game time, and Missouri was outrebounded by the Roos 32-30,

Possibly the only saving grace for Missouri is the calendar.

March isn't for four months. Conference play begins in six weeks. The return of the Border War against rival Kansas is in 26 days.

There's time to correct this unsightly error. Only time will tell how long that takes.

"Season's young. I feel like we're still good," Missouri's Javon Pickett said. "Everybody's going to take one of these types of games early. So it's just best that we learn from it now."

Contact Eric Blum at eblum@columbiatribune.com. Follow @ByEricBlum on Twitter.

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This article originally appeared on Columbia Daily Tribune: Mizzou's blowout by Kansas City in second game raises questions