Arkansas ran over the Tigers in another fast-paced game. The evening was reminiscent of days past, where the Hogs ran wild over MU.
At halftime of Wednesday’s contest between Mizzou and Arkansas, the Razorbacks honored one of their vaunted squads from the Nolan Richardson era. The 1989-1990 Razorbacks, who won the Southwest Conference and made the Final Four, took center court at their old stomping grounds.
Most players, including leading scorer Todd Day, made the trip to Fayetteville. Mike Anderson, who was a longtime assistant coach under Richardson at UA, received a raucous applause from the home crowd. But the crescendo didn’t come until the camera panned to Richardson, who really got the UA faithful loud and on their feet.
“Unbelievable atmosphere,” head coach Dennis Gates said. “We knew coming in that there was going to be a different energy in this building.”
Highlights of their successes played on the video board: the clips featured Richardson shouting and red jerseys flying up and down the court, pulverizing opponents in the open court. Their “40 Minutes of Hell” style of play, which emphasized outrunning the opposition to an extreme on both ends of the floor, helped pave the way for undoubtedly the most successful stretch in Arkansas basketball history. The school on a hill was taken to new heights: by the time Richardson retired in 2002, the Hogs had six finishes in the AP top 12, three Final Four appearances, two national title game appearances and, best of all, a national championship victory in 1994.
Their brand didn’t just beat opponents; it destroyed everything associated with the other team’s existence. That happened to Mizzou, who dropped seven of 10 games to the Hogs when Richardson was the coach. Its losses to the Razorbacks included shellackings in 1993 and 1994; the final scores were 120-68 and 94-71, respectively. The Tigers committed a ludicrous 54 combined turnovers — 27 in each contest — and looked overmatched against
Three decades later, Mizzou was using a similar formula that fueled them to immense success. Per BartTorvik, the Tigers entered Wednesday in the top-30 of turnover rate on defense and they frequently cashed in on those extra opportunities. That’s exactly what happened when these teams matched up on Jan. 18, as MU turned a lot of defense into even more offense amidst an early 18-0 run.
The Tigers were also No. 1 in the country in free throw rate, a number that was propelled by an increased sense of aggressiveness and new personnel that . Mizzou was also elite at scoring in transition and knocking down three-pointers, both on the fastbreak and in the halfcourt. Essentially, it felt like Mizzou could out-Arkansas Arkansas; after all, the team that was being honored lost to MU 89-88 early in the season. Perhaps time would become a flat circle by evening’s end, and the Tigers would claim a season sweep of their border rivals.
Instead, Arkansas out-Mizzou’d Mizzou.
“They were very disruptive,” Marques Warrick said. “That really hurt us. It was a lot of, like coach said, self-infliction.”
Just like old times, the Razorbacks turned the thermostat up to sweltering levels of heat. What’s funny is that hogs don’t usually like warmer temperatures; the hogs in white jerseys flourished in it. They forced 18 turnovers, MU’s second-highest total this season. Not only that, UA was able to capitalize. The Tigers were beat 30-14 in points off of turnovers, a battle that has often gone the way of the Black & Gold.
Arkansas also looked a little bit like its predecessors in the open floor, outscoring Mizzou 22-4 in fastbreak points. That’s another area that MU has often won this season, but with so much current and former high-flying spirit in the building, Arkansas beat Mizzou at its own game. Its trio of starting guards — D.J. Wagner, Adou Thiero and Johnell Davis — were instrumental in getting Bud Walton Arena to party like it was 1990 again, combining for 46 points and captaining the all-out assaults in transition.
“They just put their head down and go,” Warrick said. “I think that was one of their gameplans coming in: try to drive us, go downhill, even in the halfcourt. When we let them get out in transition, especially off turnovers … it’s hard to stop.”
Additionally, the Hogs shot 37 free throws and made 28 of them. Mizzou, on the other hand, shot just 17 free throws and made 13 of them.
“Those are things that you can’t do on the road an expect to win,” Gates said.
While Saturday wasn’t exactly hell for Mizzou, it was far from heaven, which the Tigers ascended to after they beat Alabama on Wednesday. They’d once again made a statement — they weren’t just Davids conquering Goliaths, but rather, they were evolving into Goliaths themselves. They suddenly commanded a level of respect that hadn’t been experienced by Mizzou in well over a decade. All across the MU fanbase, people started drinking the Kool-Aid that was flavored with victory and promise. In fact, an MU student got sugar-high and predicted that Mizzou would beat Arkansas by 16 points in its own building.
What a freakin’ moron.
Saturday was another reminder that history can pop up at any moment, even in a conference that’s actively making it with its collective greatness. There were other reasons that Mizzou saw its three-game winning streak snap: Caleb Grill shot 2-of-12 from three-point range, while Mark Mitchell was the only starter to score more than 10 points — he had 17. Despite the bench’s best efforts to provide a winning scoring punch (41 bench points, including 17 from Warrick and 23 from Grill and Jacob Crews combined), it wasn’t enough.
Mizzou got ran out of the gym on Saturday. However, the hope for the Tigers will be for this game to act as a catalyst for future success — one that could maybe get them honored at halftime a few decades down the road.
“We learn from these type of games,” Warrick said. “We’ll debrief a little bit, and we’ll focus on what we could’ve done right.”