Chat Mizzou sports with Dave Matter at 11 a.m. Friday
Bring your Tigers football, basketball and recruiting questions, and talk to Mizzou beat writer Dave Matter in a live chat at 11 a.m. Friday.
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Expect games to be shuffled around or canceled completely. Teams will have to shut down activity once a player or coach tests positive because everyone else on the team will likely be contact traced as a high-risk close contact. Positive tests could lead to a week or two of all practices/games being shut down. It's going to be a mess. But teams and conferences will plow through and do all they can to get to an NCAA bracket. The financial structure of college sports might not be able to afford two straight years without the industry's most valuable piece of inventory. The path to the bracket won't be pretty. The process is going to be complicated and probably unfair to some teams. But the college sports needs the Tournament to happen in 2021, perhaps at any cost.
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There are no win requirements to play in a bowl game this year. Back in October, the NCAA waived bowl eligibility requirements and waived the minimum number of contests required for FBS teams because so many games are getting canceled. Mizzou will almost assuredly play in a bowl whether it finishes 3-7 or 7-3.
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Growing up in St. Louis in the 1980s-90s, Mizzou football was completely off my radar. I read the stories in the Post-Dispatch, but the Tigers were rarely on TV and just didn't grab my attention. I was a college football fan and watched the big games of the week, but that was never Missouri.As for hoops, obviously Mizzou had some great years when I was a kid, during those years when you grow an attachment to teams. I loved the Doug Smith-Anthony Peeler teams. Peeler was probably my favorite. Such an exciting player, played his best on the biggest stages.
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As I wrote in my game story, Chang has been recovering from a non-COVID illness. That was according to the team spokesman pregame. After the game, Martin said he was "a little banged up." Either way, he's expected back soon.Martin also said Mitchell Smith was overcoming an illness - not COVID - and was almost a pregame scratch. When healthy, he'll be a bigger part of the rotation and play more than his 11 minutes Wednesday. It's fair to say the first three players off the bench most nights will be Pickett, Mitchell Smith and Buggs. Those three guys can be valuable role players. Then you've got Torrence Watson and Chang on the wings, Parker Braun at the four and five positions. Wilmore is another option at the five.
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The routine is a little different this year with the COVID protocols.I try to get to the press box about 90 minutes before kickoff. There's no on-field access this year, but other years I'd like to get down on the field during pregame warmups just to get a sense of who's playing, who might be in street clothes, etc. I'll usually post some pregame notes at STLtoday.com and start a live blog that I'll update periodically during the game. I'll post an updated preliminary game story once the game is over. Then it's time for the postgame press conference. Any other year, that means heading down to the team facility to interview the coach and players, but all of that is on Zoom this year. Once the interviews are done, I'll go back and update my stories for the website and the print edition. I write two print stories for every game, plus the online version, so lots of writing, re-writing and editing for the next few hours. For an 11 a.m. game, the press conference is usually around 3:30. I'll probably write until about 6 or 7 ... then either head home or back to my hotel.It's not all that glamorous, but I've got a pretty tight routine down after 20 years.
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