Where Do Missouri Tigers Turn With Loss Of Williams?

In late night news, the Missouri Tigers basketball team took yet another huge hit to follow a horribly disappointing season.

It was announced via multiple reports, that the team’s leading scorer and rebounder from this past season, Jonathan Williams III would be transferring from the school. With that goes the key ingredient to what little offensive production the Tigers had.

If Mizzou’s basketball program, which finished dead last in all of the SEC, wasn’t in a black hole then, they surely are now.

Mandatory Credit: Beth Hall-USA TODAY Sports

In Williams, Mizzou had, at the very least, a formidable starting multi-position player who could score. Not much of the same can be said about the rest of the very youthful squad, which was under the direction of new head coach Kim Anderson last season and still was trying to find any sort of identity as the season came to a very early close.

Anderson succeeded Frank Haith’s regime, from where William’s tenure with MU was born. He was brought in by assistant coach and head recruiter Tim Fuller, who, despite the ugly fallout and departure of Haith at Mizzou, elected to stay on and see the transition to the new coach through.

That transition, as it turns out, was a rocky one. Anderson’s hire was polarizing—praised by many who wanted a Mizzou Made former Tiger player on the sideline, criticized by those who thought a bigger, more experienced name was available.

With Anderson’s popularity beginning to wane, even in just the first year of his tenure, the Tigers needed positive things to start happening in Columbia.

This is not positive. After Fuller elected to resign his duties to coach elsewhere, it seems the players he recruited might be interested in following suit to exit the chaos at Missouri. With Williams potentially being the first of many dominoes to fall, it’s possible that the this thing could spiral completely out of control before the offseason even starts.

The question now is, where does Missouri go from here? How do you replace the best scorer on the team? And better yet, how do it when the team was so dreadful at scoring in the first place?

The answers to these questions can’t really be answered until we know how far the apple will fall—how many players will flee the situation.

But we can start with a educated guess on what the next steps are. Mizzou must double their efforts on the recruiting trail. Kim Anderson and company must bring in the right forces to find players that they can develop into future leaders of this team. Patience must remain in the Mizzou fan base.

It seems that this is a time of hopelessness. But all teams that succeed fail first. Fans must remember this as the things move forward.

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