Bring your Tigers football, basketball and recruiting questions, and talk to Eli Hoff in a live chat at 11 a.m. Thursday.
Live transcript
Eli ±á´Ç´Ú´Ú:ÌýMorning, all! Thanks for swinging by this week's Mizzou chat. As always, I'm here for a couple of hours to answers your questions, hear out your takes, all that fun stuff.
A quick pair of programming notes: We're going to wrap up today's chat an hour earlier than we usually do — I'll close the room at 1 p.m. It's a quieter week on the Mizzou front, so I hope that's not a problem. Second, there won't be a Mizzou chat next week. I'll be in Rolla next Thursday for the Board of Curators meeting, getting a whole lot of info for y'all on stadium renovations, the AD search and whatever else I can find.
bigron:ÌýEli, enjoy your coverage of Mizzou sports! Anything new on the portal for mens Bball? If for instance how does a school suggest that a current player should leave?
±á´Ç´Ú´Ú:ÌýThanks! It's been pretty quiet for Mizzou — and across the board around college basketball. I think coaches are so inundated by film and stats and calls to make that it's taking a lot of time for visits and offers to come together. It's almost like having the transfer portal and postseason run simultaneously is a bad idea — but hey, I don't make those decisions.
Northern Kentucky's Marques Warrick, a guard who averaged 19.9 pts, 2.5 reb, 2.4 ast on 42.5% shooting from the field, has said he'll be visiting MU soon. That's the only upcoming visit I'm aware of. Mizzou's been in touch with plenty of portal prospects, of course, though.
I imagine conversations around potentially pushing a player into the portal are honest ones. Coaches know what they want roles to be. Players know what their abilities are and what roles they want. So a coach might sit a player down and say hey, I think your role for next year will likely be on the back end of the rotation. That way the player and coach can both be transparent about what they want and where they see things going. It doesn't need to be some hostile rejection. It's about relationships and communication and transparency. I don't know how those conversations have gone with Mizzou this offseason, but given that those values are important to Dennis Gates when he's recruiting, I imagine they're important in those settings as well.
KMR:ÌýAre you suprised that we haven't heard of more players transfering out of Mizzou bball? Or will that happen after we secure some commitments?
±á´Ç´Ú´Ú:ÌýI don't think I'm surprised, but it is interesting. Mizzou needed to lose a scholarship player to the portal (or bump a player off scholarship status) to accommodate the incoming freshman class. From there, it's lose a player to gain a player. Mabor Majak wasn't on scholarship. Curt Lewis and Jesus Carralero Martin were on scholarship, so they were the ones that made space for the freshmen and the addition of Jacob Crews.
There are still players with decisions to make, which I wrote about this week. I thought there would be one spot open to the portal on the low end and three spots on the high end. So right now, Mizzou's sitting on the bottom end of that. I think there could still be one or two portal entrants. But if there aren't, I can't say I would be surprised.
²Ï³Ü±ð²õ³Ù¾±´Ç²Ô²õ:ÌýFirstly, good luck in Rolla next week. Who knew that being on a sports beat would require this level of investigative muckraking journalism? Is Pingeton saying anything about the bizarre situation she’s in (mostly of her own making)?
±á´Ç´Ú´Ú:ÌýI like doing the digging! I started my career in sports and then made a hard pivot into investigative reporting. This is going to make me sound like a nerd, but I've filed well over 100 public records requests with upwards of probably 30 states and federal agencies. I'm all for that kind of stuff, and I'd covered the Curators in particular before, so writing about how they operate is very much in my wheelhouse. I didn't expect to be doing so much of that kind of work this early, but hey, we reporters have a job to do.
Robin Pingeton hasn't said anything about next season. The team hasn't either — they still haven't announced her retention officially or confirmed it. The quiet approach is the route they're taking. I don't know if I'd say it's entirely of her making. I mean yes, her coaching performance is her coaching performance and not anyone else's. But this exact retention situation is more a byproduct of the AD search's timing and how the athletics department is proceeding during this interim period. The administration made the decision to keep Pingeton into the last year of her contract. And you can't blame her for wanting to, like, keep her job.
Palmetto State Fan:ÌýWhat is the current rule regarding an athlete transferring to another university? As I recall, there was an injunction against the NCAA's policy/rule regarding this issue with one of the plaintiffs being the U of Tennessee and the other being the U of Virginia? Any movement on the suit and the transfer rule?
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±á´Ç´Ú´Ú:ÌýÌýIs it bad if I say I'm not quite sure? I'll justify that by saying I don't know if many people in college sports could say they're completely sure right now either. Athletes can transfer multiple times. They're still limited by the portal windows, but they can keep hopping in. The Tennessee case has a little more to do with schools' involvement in NIL distribution/arrangement.
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As far as NCAA rules and the courts go, the safe assumption is that regulations are going to continue to be stripped away. The smart schools and athletes will continue to be pushing the fold in what's possible there. There's not a whole lot that you can look at and say "Nope, definitively can't do that."
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Palmetto State Fan:ÌýEli, you mentioned in your comment earlier that this was a "quieter week" in terms of Mizzou athletics. That's a problem. Fans and consumers have a myriad of choices in terms of their discretionary and especially entertainment dollars. The marketing and publicity team in the Athletics Department should, in my view, be a peak performance constantly creating and developing information and excitement.
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±á´Ç´Ú´Ú:ÌýWhat would you want constant information and excitement to look like? There are already football and basketball games from the end of August through varying points in March. That covers approximately seven months of the year, give or take a bit. The spring transfer portal for both sports adds a month onto that, at least. Football preseason also adds about a month. There are still things happening right now. Baseball and softball are in full (no pun intended) swing. So is golf. Heck, there's even tennis. People just don't care about those like they do football and basketball. And in terms of fan engagement, Mizzou starts its offseason caravan tonight in Sedalia.
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It's important to keep in mind that there are real people working in the athletics department. The coaches and athletes are human, too. They pour so much into each season. And frankly, the offseasons too, just behind closed doors to a larger agree. It would be a lot to ask them to be going at the level they are in-season year-round.
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arnezzi:ÌýDid the MBB season prove that, thanks to the inability to settle on a rotation early, Gates had too many players on the roster, or, thanks to the injuries, he didn’t have enough?
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±á´Ç´Ú´Ú:ÌýThat's an interesting question. For a little bit there at the beginning of the season, the larger rotation was allowing players to exert more effort on the floor and then come to the bench when they needed a breather. But that went away as players started getting hurt. The answer is probably that Gates didn't have enough *SEC caliber* players on the roster. I can see how a deep roster could be beneficial. There just has to be some quality with that.
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arnezzi:ÌýBiggest offseason move: Booche’s sold. Will it look any different next fall?
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Hoff:ÌýIt's a big deal! Booche's was sold to employees, though, and they've said they don't really plan on changing anything. But it sounds to me like I better make a stop for a couple burgers soon to verify that. In the name of journalism, right?
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And really, the part that makes it a big deal is that it went to employees. If it went to more of an outside buyer, that's when there'd be more worry of things changing. But keeping it in-house allows for a lot more of the same Booche's we all love.
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arnezzi:Ìýwhy wouldn’t any player thinking about the portal already have declared? What would hold them back. I can’t believe the MBB names being bandied about are negotiating better NIL deals.
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±á´Ç´Ú´Ú:ÌýMaybe. Perhaps they're are looking around at the market. Or at how their opportunity at Mizzou might change. There are a lot of factors to go with a player entering the portal.
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arnezzi:Ìýnome of the 3 FB players who entered the portal this week was a surprise, and we thank them for their contributions to the team and hope they find a good fit for the selves
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±á´Ç´Ú´Ú:ÌýTo catch folks up: DL Ky Montgomery and TE Ryan Hoerstkamp announced their intent to enter the portal when it opens next week. RB Michael Cox will reportedly do so as well. All three are fairly far down on the depth chart, particularly as far as the next season goes. They're the sort of players who might be looking to move down from the SEC level in pursuit of more immediate playing time, I'd imagine.
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arnezzi:Ìý(continued) do you expect to see any more FB players enter the portal. We sure have a lot of good WRs.
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±á´Ç´Ú´Ú:ÌýThere could always be some more of those depth players who decide they want a different role. But I don't think anyone's role really shifted during spring football. The players who were in the mix for starting jobs still are. Nobody won or lost a starting position in spring ball. That's not to say that there couldn't be a player whose thinking has changed since the winter portal window, but that would be rather surprising at this point. And considering that there weren't any major portal departures during the winter window, that should set Mizzou up well from a retention standpoint.
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With wideouts in particular: They chose to stick around in a deep room before. They've got one of the best WR coaches in the country to work with. And maybe the best college WR in the game right now to work alongside. Unless they're purely after playing time, they're in the right spot to get better as players.
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DEK:ÌýI know you have had somewhat a varied professional background which probably afforded you a healthy perspective when you took over the beat writing with PD for Mizzou sports. Still I would imagine there have been some pleasant and maybe less pleasant surprises with the position. What are your most interesting surprises you feel comfortable sharing with us ?
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±á´Ç´Ú´Ú:ÌýThere really — and this is me being honest – any unpleasant surprises. I've been quite pleasantly surprised by how many of you there are who care — not just about Mizzou sports, but about our coverage. It's always nice as a writer not to feel like my words are going out into some empty void. These chats are an example of that, but I've also enjoyed interacting with those of y'all who take the time to write emails in between our weekly chats. That hasn't always been the case at other stops in my (admittedly short) career. Second, what I've gotten to cover in my tenure has also been pleasantly surprising. I mean, I spent a week covering the Cotton Bowl! There are a lot of parts of this job that aren't glamorous — being a sportswriter really isn't all that flashy. But walking across the AT&T Stadium field with confetti raining down after Mizzou won that game to write about the reaction... yeah, that was pretty darn cool. I've also been very pleasantly surprised by how nice the folks around Mizzou athletics (players, coaches, staff) are. So many of them really enjoy engaging with my questions, which I appreciate. One other thing that did catch me by surprise: How tiring crossover season when football and basketball are running is. Those few weeks in the fall were almost constant work whenever I was awake, which led to more waking hours than I usually prefer. But this job rocks, y'all.
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DCG:ÌýI'm curious, given the current logjam on Mizzou's MBB roster, what Gates's fascination is with Kaleb Brown. He is so clearly overmatched at this level, especially on offense, where he has no discernable DI skill.
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±á´Ç´Ú´Ú:ÌýNobody really saw much of what Kaleb Brown had to offer this year, since he missed almost the whole season with a stress fracture. He hasn't flashed a whole lot, but fairness probably says he deserves a chance to show a bit more. Gates took him off scholarship, so he's a fairly low-risk guy to have in the program.
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KMR:ÌýHow many of the following do you think will be on Mizzou next year? Javon Porter, Tarris Reed, Mark Mitchell
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±á´Ç´Ú´Ú:ÌýOne would be good for Mizzou, two would be great, three might not make a lot of positional sense but would be quite the flex.
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