Weekly report

By Tiger Fan

Tiger notes…

-Leading off this week is the women’s basketball team, which just keeps winning. The Tigers are now 20-6 (10-4) after Wednesday’s 67-59 victory over Iowa State. The best news is that they are now guaranteed to finish in the top four of the league for the first time since the formation of the Big XII. It’s also the first time since 1990 that the Tigers have had a 20-win regular season. It could be an exciting postseason for yet another Mizzou women’s team (hopefully they can duplicate the success that the volleyball team had in the fall).

-So far so good for the Tiger swim team, hosting the Big XII Championships in Columbia for the first time this week. On Wednesday, the Tigers broke two school relay records and an individual record, putting the men in second place and the women in third. Let’s hope this success continues into the weekend.

-Anyone wondering exactly how good Max Scherzer and the No. 12 Mizzou baseball team is will find out this weekend. The Tigers will play one of their biggest games of the year on Friday as they take on No. 2 Florida in Gainesville, presumably with Scherzer on the mound. They will then play Wake Forest on Saturday and finish up with Ohio State on Sunday before coming back to Columbia for an eight-game home stand, beginning with Illinois State on Wednesday. The Zou staff will be on hand next weekend as the Tigers host UW-Milwaukee, so keep an eye out for a full report.

-On Tuesday, Tyler McCormick became the third Tiger this season to be named Big XII Wrestler of the Week. It’s nice to see a highly ranked Mizzou team that actually lives up to the hype!

-Here’s why it stinks to be a Mizzou basketball fan, especially this season: With the Tigers leading Texas A&M by 10 in the second half, I pointed out to Born-A-Tiger that we were still perfectly capable of losing the game. In fact, the disturbing thing was that I expected the Tigers to lose and I really didn’t care. After all, we essentially have a lame duck team at this point… big changes are in store regardless of how the season ends. And sure enough, the Tigers lost. But that’s not the annoying part. The annoying part is that they managed to make us care before all was said and done. When the Tigers got the ball into Gardner’s hands for the final shot, Born-A-Tiger and I both jumped to our feet. We both thought the game-tying buzzer beater was going in. We were ready to go crazy, even though minutes earlier we had been saying that we didn’t care… and then the shot bounced off the front of the rim and it was over. Another Tiger loss. And another clear indicator that no matter how much Tiger fans criticize the team and say we have given up, we always somehow believe that things might turn out differently… and that’s the painful part.

-Speaking of painful, Elson Floyd has now launched an independent investigation into the firing of Quin Snyder. I’m not sure what he hopes to find, but I hope whatever it is results in the removal of Mike Alden, et. al. I’ll be weighing in with more thoughts about Mr. Floyd in a few days… because unlike most, I feel he gets too much criticism in the basketball realm.

Quick-hit non-Mizzou thoughts…

The Shani Davis-Chad Hedrick feud has turned personal for me and my friend Dustin because the Olympic Fantasy Olympic League is going down to the wire. Check it out… I find the epic collapse of Bode Miller to be absolutely hilarious… I find the fact that Isiah Thomas still has a job hilarious. In fact, if I was the owner of the Knicks, Gary Link would be walking up Isiah’s driveway as we speak… For the record, as bad as the Vanderbilt football team is in real life, they are infinitely worse on NCAA ’06… I don’t understand the Bassmaster Classic. What is the athletic skill involved here?... The video of the autistic team manager in New York who scored 20 points when he was put in to his team’s last high school basketball game might be the coolest thing I’ve ever seen. Sports would be infinitely more exciting if fans always had someone meaningful to cheer for. But instead, we get T.O., Bode Miller, Kobe Bryant, etc…