Missouri athletics enjoy success, know more work is ahead

COLUMBIA — A series of surprises led to Missouri’s Big 12 tournament title last week in Oklahoma City.

Kansas and Oklahoma failed to win a game. Missouri didn’t have to play a team seeded higher than sixth. And the Tigers didn’t self-destruct away from Mizzou Arena.

But the biggest surprise may have been that Missouri actually won the title.

Since the creation of the Big 12 in 1996, Missouri has the fewest conference and division titles - six. Texas has the most - 104. Missouri would have to win the conference title in every sport in which it competes for the next four years to pass Texas.

Missouri is the only school that hasn't reached double digits in number of Big 12 titles. And MU is 24 titles behind Baylor, which sits in the middle of the Big 12.

But Missouri’s basketball team winning the conference tournament last Saturday is part of a new trend in MU’s athletic department. Missouri’s teams, which traditionally have been good at being mediocre, are starting to flirt with conference supremacy.

More than half of Missouri’s teams have been ranked in the top 25 at some point in 2008-09. MU’s football and basketball teams are among the Big 12’s best in the same year, both finishing in the top four of the conference for the first time in a decade.

Along with the football and basketball teams’ success has come more exposure. Half of the football team’s games were televised nationally. The basketball team has played 14 games on national TV.

ESPN SportsCenter anchor John Anderson, an MU alumnus, said Missouri is finally fulfilling the potential it has had for so long.

“We’re at a point where the university’s athletic department is being what everybody thought they could always be,” Anderson said. “For 25 years I heard about the whole sleeping giant. ‘Oh, Missouri’s a sleeping giant,’ especially in the football side…So I think that’s really come to fruition.”

Anderson is as excited about Missouri’s success as any Tiger fan. And he even benefits personally from Missouri’s emergence on the national scene.

“I like it because I get patted on the back all the time like I might’ve had something to do with it,” he said. “I’m like, ‘Dude, I just went to school there.’”

When Anderson and ESPN.com senior writer Pat Forde were MU students in the mid-80's, they were a lot less demanding than some of today’s fans.

“I think expectations have changed dramatically,” Forde said. “I think that there were always hopes going back to when I was in school in the 1980s that Missouri could compete with Oklahoma and Nebraska and maybe win a Big Eight title at the time, but realistically everybody was willing to settle for a heck of a lot less. A winning season would have been fine when it came to football.”

As Missouri’s football team went 103-120 through the ‘70s and ‘80s, Norm Stewart and Missouri basketball kept MU relevant.

“That program by itself carried this athletic program for many years,” said Mike Alden, Missouri’s athletic director. “…If not for the success he (Stewart) had in basketball, even though the forum wasn’t huge, you wouldn’t have had a national platform for anything.”

Stewart won seven Big Eight regular season titles during the two decades, and one more in the 1993-94 season.