Season glance: The first five

Basketball season will be here before you know it, so let’s take a look at how the Missouri Tigers will get their rebound season kicked off.

First a look back. I know you don’t want to be reminded of what last season was like and I don’t really want to think too much about it, so this will be quick.

Missouri started the season 3-1 with the loss coming to Memphis at home and the third win as a promising come-from-behind victory at Minnesota.

Then the first sign of what the season would become, a one-point loss the Jackson State in Mizzou Arena.

The Tigers won their next four games, including beating Wichita State, but lost a nine-point game to Kansas, a six-point game to Seton Hall and got crushed by 24 against Illinois for Braggin’ Rights.

That stretch is where everything started falling apart.

The Tigers beat Central Arkansas by 33 at home on Dec. 30, then lost their next 19 games to go winless in conference play.

The only stats the Tigers led their opponents in were free throw percentage (though on almost 200 fewer attempts), turnovers per game, steals and blocks.

It was bad and every game felt weirdly the same. Missouri would fall behind with a slow start, charge back to make it seem like a game early in the second half, then fall apart again at the end so what was a couple-possession game midway into the second half turned into the opponent, almost every opponent, cruising through the final minutes.

Alright, that sucked. Now let’s look forward.

The Black and Gold Tigers go on the road for the second half of their home-and-home series with the Tigers from Tennessee.

Memphis was 22-10 last season, but lost eight of its last 15 games, including a nine-point loss to Wichita State in the first round of the AAC tournament, dropping the Tigers out of the NCAA Tournament.

Penny Hardaway returns for his seventh season at the helm in 2024-25 and has a record of 132-62 and has six consecutive 20-win seasons.

Memphis will have a very new look compared to the team that faced Missouri last season.

Last year’s leading scorer and rebounder David Jones is currently an unsigned NBA free agent, second-leading scorer Nae’Qwan Tomlin was recently waived by the Cleveland Cavaliers and third-leading scorer Jahvon Quinerly announced his retirement from basketball in September.

You have to drop down to Nicholas Jourdain, the team’s seventh-leading scorer at 6.5 points per game, to find the highest-scoring returner on the roster.

But Hardaway has fully remade his roster through the portal a couple of times in the past couple of years.

There are only two returners from last year’s roster. Hardaway brought in eight transfers and one freshman to complete this year’s squad.

Memphis’ transfer class is led by Rivals’ top-overall transfer recruit in five-star PJ Haggerty coming from Tulsa.

As a redshirt freshman guard last season, Haggerty was third-team All-American Athletic Conference with 21.2 points, 5.5 rebounds and 3.8 assists per game.

Memphis also added four-star guard Tyrese Hunter, the No. 130 transfer recruit, who was the Big 12 freshman of the year in 2022 at Texas and averaged 11.1 points and 4.1 assists as a junior last season.

Add in four-star center Dain Dainja, who shot 68.2 percent from the field, scored 6.3 points per game and brought down 3.7 rebounds per game last year at Illinois, and graduate center Moussa Cisse, who started 17 games for Ole Miss last year and led the team with 56 offensive rebounds, and there are a lot of new faces to Memphis fans, but not to Missouri fans.

Overall a tough test to open the season with both teams operating with completely new looks from last season. A great look at what the Tigers will bring to the floor this season.

There’s the overpowered early-season opponent.

Howard went 18-17 overall last season, but did not win a game in three games against power-conference opponents. Although the Bison did take Cincinnati to overtime.

The Bison did win the MEAC Tournament with wins against Morgan State, Norfolk State and Delaware State to reach the NCAA Tournament First Four where Howard lost to Wagner College.

The Bison return leading scorer Bryce Harris at guard. He averaged 16.6 points and 7.5 rebounds per game last season, as well as Marcus Dockery who averaged 13.5 points and 3.3 rebounds per game last season.

They brought in four transfers, including Mounir Hima from Syracuse and Antonio Chol from Rutgers, as well as adding six freshmen.

The Bison are favored by many to win the MEAC, but that doesn’t mean you should expect much of a game when they come to Columbia.

Eastern Washington went 21-11 last season with a Big Sky conference record of 15-3.

The Eagles loaded up on the big-time opponents early in the season last year, facing Utah, Ole Miss, Cincinnati, Stanford, Washington State, USC, Air Force and Washington in its first 11 games. They beat Air Force out of that group, then went 17-4 the rest of the season against schools more at their level.

But Eastern Washington dropped the first game of the Big Sky Tournament against Sacramento State to have its season end in early March.

The Eagles had five scorers averaging more than 10 points per game last season but don’t return any of them.

Dan Monson from Long Beach State took over the job after last season and enters his first year in Cheney, Washington, after taking Long Beach State to the NCAA Tournament by winning the Big West conference tournament after being fired.

Monson has a new-look roster with a few returners, mainly Sebastian Hartmann who played in every game for the Eagles as a freshman last season.

Otherwise, they brought in Tyler Powell from Nevada, Shaumba Ngoyi followed Monson from Long Beach State after a redshirt season and Pavo Dziuba who is on his fourth school in four years. Monson also added a couple of players from the NAIA and JUCO levels.

Expect a big win for the Tigers and a good opportunity to see the highly-ranked freshman class getting a lot of minutes.

The Delta Devils is up there with my favorite mascots, that’s just fun.

The team is not.

MVSU hasn’t won 10 games in more than a decade and is regularly one of the worst teams in Division I.

The Delta Devils were 1-30 last season, with the only win coming on senior night against Prairie View A&M, and only scored 75 points in a game once, while being held to 50 points or less 11 times.

I don’t feel like diving into who is on this team, you don’t need to know. If the Tigers win by anything less than 30 points, that’s a bad sign.

Should be a great opportunity for the end-of-the-bench guys to get the majority of their minutes for the season.

Let’s finish up here for today, with the battle of teams that went winless in conference play last season!

Sorry.

The Pacific Tigers were 6-26 last season and 0-16 in conference. Pacific’s best win was easily an 87-79 victory at California on Nov. 10. But once they got into WCC play, the Tigers played only four games that ended with a single-digit margin.

First-year head coach Dave Smart brings in a new-look roster without any top scorers returning from last season.

Smart was able to draw junior guard Lamar Washington from Texas Tech with him after Washington played in all 30 games for the Red Raiders with single-digit averages in points, rebounds and assists. He also brought in power-conference transfers in Kris Keinys from Minnesota and Jazz Gardner from Nevada.

No reason to expect the Tigers are anything worse than 4-1 and you really shouldn’t take any thoughts about the team out of games 2-through-5.

The Memphis game will be hard to draw conclusions from just because the first game of the season is rarely all that telling about how a team will fair throughout the year, but definitely a fun way to kick off the year.

Head on over to the Tiger Walk to discuss this story and so much more.