Before Missouri took the court on Friday night at Bridgestone Arena for its first NCAA Tournament game in five years, coach Cuonzo Martin wrote this on the board in the locker room:
“Did you play as hard as you can play?”
By the time his team retreated into the locker room after a fiasco of a first half in what would become a 67-54 loss to Florida State, this might as well have been a taunt.
Martin was, in his own words, “very angry” at the cave-in he’d witnessed on the way to a 22-point halftime deficit.