COLUMBIA, Mo.—For years, Missouri sports and heartbreak were never too far apart.
From a football referee’s error that awarded Colorado an extra, fifth down in 1990 to Ty Edney’s full-court dash in a last-second loss to UCLA in the NCAA men’s basketball tournament five years later, the Tiger sports program was defined as much by hard luck as marquee wins.
These days, with NCAA tournament appearances in multiple sports nearly routine, the moments that gave Missouri fans nightmares are almost ancient history.
The Missouri baseball team returns to the NCAA Tournament for the seventh straight year, facing Western Kentucky Friday at a regional site in Oxford, Miss.
The Missouri softball squad won the Big 12 title and heads to the Women’s College World Series for the first time in 15 years after upsetting 11-time national champion UCLA in southern California.
An overachieving men’s basketball team won its own Big 12 title, set a school record with 31 wins and advanced to the round of eight, falling seven points shy of a trip to the Final Four in a narrow loss to top-seeded Connecticut.
The football team fell short of its own lofty expectations but still rewrote the record book with yet another bowl victory and consecutive 10-win seasons, a school first.
“Winning is contagious,” said Whit Babcock, Missouri’s senior associate athletic director. “It creates positive peer pressure.”
Missouri athletes also are raising the bar off the field. Five of the school’s 20 teams topped the conference in Academic Progress Rate rankings, an NCAA measure of classroom performance. The school’s average ranking of third in all sports also led the Big 12.
“When you win games and play by the rules and graduate kids, alumni hold their heads a little higher, state pride is higher, you can wear that Mizzou logo a little more proudly,” Babcock said.
The athletic program’s across-the-board success—including an NCAA individual title for heavyweight wrestler Mark Ellis—prompted Columbia Daily Tribune sports columnist Joe Walljasper to label 2008-09 “the greatest school year in the history of University of Missouri athletics.”
He noted that before this year, both football and men’s basketball finished their seasons ranked in the final Associated Press polls only twice before, in 1979-80 and 1981-82.
The Tigers’ also had won just one Big 12 title—in softball in 1997. This year, they won championships in men’s basketball, softball and women’s soccer.
Baseball coach Tim Jamieson remembers the dark days well. Now in his 21st year as a Missouri coach, including six as an assistant, he described an athletic department in disarray, save for Norm Stewart’s basketball program.
“When I first got here, in all sports other than basketball, it was as bad as bad could be,” Jamieson said. “The atmosphere within the department, the facilities, the budget … you can’t imagine a school in a big-time conference being any worse than we were.”
Under athletic director Mike Alden, who arrived in 1998, the school’s annual athletics budget has grown from less than $14 million to more than $44 million.
Missouri currently ranks 27th in the Directors’ Cup, which measures overall athletics excellence among NCAA schools. That ranking is likely to rise once the baseball and softball seasons are complete.
The school’s previous showing in the Directors’ Cup was a 37th place finish in 2002-03.
“It’s the complete package now,” said Jamieson. “The first 18, 19 years of my career, Missouri athletics was a stepping stone (for coaches). Now it’s a destination.”
