Welcome everyone to The Verdict, Preseason Edition. In this series we’re going to be looking at a host of topics in the lead up to the much anticipated 26-27 Tigers Basketball season. Instead of going through the nitty-gritty of every single player as I’ve done in past Player Previews, I’m taking a bit of a step back and looking at some larger scale topics for Mizzou’s team. In this installment we’re going to be looking at Mizzou’s schedule. As a note, we’re assuming for the sake of simplicity that 5th year seniors will be eligible for their respective teams.
Let’s face it. Scheduling in the Dennis Gates era at Mizzou has stunk.
For several years running the Basketball Tigers have been handing out cupcakes like old folks on Halloween. An endless slog of the worst 100 teams in DI ball moved the turnstiles at Mizzou Arena’s loading dock like rush hour. The argument for doing so wasn’t entirely terrible. After all, Mizzou’s soft non-conference slate allowed for them to rack up 20 wins last year. Without that round number, Mizzou would’ve likely faced the same fate as conference colleague Auburn who was left to their NIT devices. That doesn’t mean it’s right. It was anti-competitive and truly served minimal benefit. Worse yet, it was awful to watch.
That conversation changed quickly over the last six months. When we look at this year’s slate, it’s night and day. The question I found asking myself is have they gone too far? We’re going to talk about that and more.
For those emerging from a hoop hibernation, Mizzou’s non-league schedule this year is a sight to behold. The Tigers will face St. Louis University and Illinois in neutral site affairs proximate for eastern Missouri alums in St. Louis. Not to be slighted by geography, the team will travel to Kansas City and face Nebraska and bitter rival Kansas. These are all NCAA Tournament teams from a year ago. Mizzou will also venture to the Windy City to face Shaka Smart’s Marquette squad – this time in a game where we can actually watch! Rounding out the death march includes the ACC/SEC Challenge game with Pittsburgh in Columbia and a road trip to Bloomington to face the Hoosiers. Most prognosticators believe this group will eventually contain five, perhaps six at-large quality teams. With the recently added 32nd allowed game, Mizzou will still face seven buy game opponents that find themselves in the bottom 100. Then Mizzou will embark on a journey in SEC play where all 18 contests feature a game involving a top 100 squad, if Bart Torvik’s preseason ratings are remotely accurate.
When we talk about scheduling, I like to look at it as a means to an end. What are we trying to accomplish here? In prior years it could best be described as letting the coaches work through a sundry of lineup combinations and rack up easy wins. This year is quite a bit different. Half of the pre-league docket features opponents who can – and will – beat you if you’re tinkering around with building depth. No, this year’s schedule is far more about results.
One consideration for this about-face is that the NCAA Tournament has expanded. I am ambivalent if not in support of this development. Yes, an additional eight teams potentially dilutes things in the first four months of the year. I don’t really care. It means more meaningful tournament games. And you’re still going to have your bracket of 64 with more fun leading up to it. Practically speaking, those final eight spots will be highly populated by middling high major program. When we’re talking about THIS schedule, that’s a feature, not a bug. Dennis Gates has been open about the Tournament’s expansion playing a role in his scheduling philosophy shift. If expansion led directly to a larger volume of NCAA Tournament games AND a highly attractive non-conference schedule, sign me up.
Speaking of the NCAA Tournament, Dennis Gates’ crew has been abysmal in neutral site games in recent years. Even setting aside his first two years on the sideline when the program was being built – and cratering in year 2 – it’s been rough. Mizzou has fashioned a 1-7 record on neutral ground over the past two years, both of which featured an eventual NCAA bid. These weren’t bad teams! They certainly played badly in these environments. And that’s incentive to figure it out.
The Tigers will play FIVE neutral site games early this winter. Dennis Gates appears dead set on figuring out how to win games like this. It’s abundantly clear that pummeling Arkansas Pine-Bluff – who is on the schedule again! – did not do the trick in past attempts. The flipside of this, however, is that if they don’t figure it out against tough teams they’re going to be staring down an oncoming freight train with SEC play looming. And the SEC ‘ain’t no joke,” in 2026-2027.
When we turn and look at how Mizzou as a program has historically scheduled, outside of a respectable job done by Cuonzo Martin that regard, it’s been decades of refined sugar. Consider the following chart showing how poorly Mizzou’s non-conference slates (“NCSOS”) have stacked up:
While it’s true that Mizzou’s program was poor itself for many of those years, it’s eye-opening that there were only two top 100 Non-Conference Strength of Schedule finishes in the twenty seasons since Quin Snyder occupied the sidelines. We don’t have the data yet on where this slate will finish, but I’d bet a fair amount Mizzou makes it a third time in 21 seasons this fall.
We early discussed goal-oriented scheduling, so what does Mizzou need to do if an NCAA Tournament is the minimum goal? I think we can all agree on that being a minimum expectation, no? Well, I’ve attempted to reverse engineer it a bit. As a noted bracket projection enthusiast, I’ve followed this in excruciating detail over the past decade or so. And I can tell you that now, Wins Above Bubble (“WAB,”) reigns supreme. A year ago, this team sheet metric was incredibly predictive as to whether a team was to be included and where they were seeded.
In the chart below I’ve plotted out the minimum route. In years’ past, a WAB of 1.00 meant a team was virtually guaranteed to be included. So how much can Mizzou stumble against this loaded slate and still be heavy favorites to achieve it? The following represents a breakdown of where Mizzou would need to finish in order to not only attain an at-large bid but also to give itself a reasonable chance of bypassing the play-in games altogether.** You know, to make the REAL Tournament without having to sing for your supper in Dayton.
(**Note: WAB in years past was set to measure how many wins above or below a team was compared to what the 45th best team in the country would do against that same schedule. In other words, the 45th best team in this metric would theoretically have a 0.0 WAB. Hence, wins above bubble. WAB has now shifted to the 55th best team in the country with the added eight tournament bids. Unfortunately, I do not have updated WAB win and loss values under this new system for this year. As such, I’ve analyzed this year’s schedule with last year’s scores. A 1.0 WAB score under the prior system historically resulted in a team ranked around 40th best, or a touch worse, in the metric. That’s generally the cutoff between teams slotted in the field of 64 and those headed for early week play-in games. That’s also precisely where Mizzou landed last year on Selection Sunday (41st in WAB at just over 1.0.) The 40th best WAB value will no longer be 1.0 this year and moving forward but the ranking would remain constant as everyone is shifted along the new scoring spectrum.)
A quick accounting of this scenario sees Mizzou winning 18 of 32 games overall and finishing .500 in SEC play. While that set of results by no means guarantees them of a spot in the “real” bracket of 64, historically it gets them very much in the conversation. And how does the non-conference performance affect this? Well, Mizzou’s WAB going into league play under these circumstances would be -0.5. Comparing this non-league performance to years past: 2026 (-0.2); 2025 (0.2); 2024 (-1.4); 2023 (1.4). Getting no marquee wins would have them in the exact neighborhood where they were a year ago despite taking five losses. Turning just one of those five designated losses into a win puts them ahead of schedule from either of the past two years. Going 2-3 in those five losses puts you ahead of a season where you went 12-1 with wins over Wichita State on the road, UCF at a neutral site and Illinois in St. Louis. In some ways this is enhancing the margin of error as much as expanding the Tournament!
Now, is it going to shake out this way? Absolutely not. The point remains no matter. The schedule is much tougher. Yes, you need to win some of the tougher games. In a results-driven business you need to deliver and Mizzou this year is no different. Their schedule has increased the opportunities and stands to benefit them in preparing for conference play as well. Time will tell whether the results show up. We can see now that the process was well-founded for a team that should always be looking to secure a bid for the best postseason in sports.