Suspendin’ Mike Anderson, head coach of the Missouri Tigers basketball squad, watched his boys take a beating last night but still put up a decent fight in a 66-62 loss to Nebraska. Unfortunately, it’s a better fight than five of his players put up last weekend.
Five players were caught at the notorious Athena bar in Columbia, MO, Saturday night when Stefhon Hanna, senior guard, couldn’t guard his chin long enough to avoid a broken jaw in an early Sunday morning brawl. Those other four players showed a distinct inability to play any defense for their teammate, leaving him on a train back home to Chicago to recuperate.
Anderson, who felt it necessary to institute a ‘zero-tolerance’ policy after taking over Quin Snyder’s ridiculous mess in 2006, has needed to be quite the disciplinarian since his arrival from UAB. In February 2007, his own son tallied a DUI. His own nephew was shot last summer outside a different Columbia club while trying to break up a fight. Other crimes and misdemeanors for the Mizzou team since Anderson’s arrival include punching women, pistol-whipping men, and peace disturbances left and right.
Mike Anderson wants to take this all more seriously than other coaches might. He seems quite serious about cleaning up this team’s act. He’ll shut down the season by sending starters and key reserves back to their dorm rooms until further notice.
Then again, he might have some family pressures to do so. Apparently, Missouri is the Von Trapp family of the Big 12. His son is on the team? Along with his nephew? Last year, his associate head coach (Melvin Watkins) had his son on the team before that son graduated and joined the coaching staff as a grad assistant. If Sister Maria had to deal with these hooligans, she would have turned the lot of them over to Mary Poppins for a fanciful journey through Dante’s Inferno.
Hopefully, Mike Anderson has the full support of the university to clean out the rest of the administration’s previous floppy-haired mistake, since graduation (or at least the exhaustion of eligibility) might be the only way through this embarrassment. After all, he will run out of extended family soon. Besides, the family he’s had on the team haven’t shown the best judgment skills, either.
If these young men with questionable abilities to make decisions have been attending class, they might know the namesake of their favorite soda joint, Athena. If they do, they’ll recognize her as the companion of Nike and giggle a little since they are, too. Maybe they’d also realize Athena was the goddess of wisdom and try praying to her for sagacity in a way that didn’t involve being on their knees in front of her college town temple, vomiting their lungs out and holding their jaws onto their faces.
Props to Tyson Sprick of MVN for pounding home this story like the Web was a mandibular joint and he demanded satisfaction for this slight.
