It's May now and we've been without sports for a month and a half. It stinks! So, to try to pass a little bit more time before sports make their return, I'm blogging about sports. A month ago, I gave you my list of my Top 10 favorite sports teams - professional sports edition. Now I'm going to follow it up with my list of my Top 10 favorite sports teams - college edition.
Similar to last time, when all of the teams were St. Louis-based teams, I'll spoil the surprise and tell you up front that all of these teams are either Baylor or Mizzou teams. Did you really expect anything different?
Here we go...
10. 1989-90 Missouri Tigers Men's Basketball - This team won the Big 8 and grabbed one of the top 12 seeds in the NCAA Tournament before flaming out and getting upset by Northern Iowa in the 1st round. I had the misfortune of watching the end of that game on TV in my Sophomore English class and I remember being crushed when Mizzou lost. Still, this team was stacked with the likes of Doug Smith (Big 8 player of the year and 2nd team All-American) and Anthony Peeler. It was one of Norm Stewart's best teams (they were ranked #1 in the country at the end of the regular season), in spite of the ignominious end to the season.
9. 2004-05 Baylor Lady Bears Basketball - In the early 2000s, Baylor athletics were the laughingstock of not only the Big 12 but all of the Power 5 conference schools. They had seldom been competitive in any of the major sports since joining the Big 12 and had dealt with scandal and tragedy in the men's basketball program. However, out of that darkness came a great light - the Baylor Lady Bears basketball team. The program had been rising for a few years under coach Kim Mulkey, but I don't know if any of us were prepared for what the team accomplished this season. They won 33 games and a national championship, the first of three national titles under Mulkey. The team was anchored by Sophia Young, one of the first superstar players in school history. This was the team that proved the Baylor COULD compete at the highest levels of major college sports and marked the arrival of the Baylor Lady Bears as a national powerhouse.
8. 1992 Baylor Bears Football - This is a sentimental pick, since this was my freshman year of college. I was a part of the Baylor Line and enjoyed cheering on the Bears while heckling opponents. The season started out horribly, with back-to-back home losses: a brual 10-9 upset loss to Louisiana Tech and a blowout loss to Colorado on a brutally hot day in which the temperature at field level neared 120 degrees. But after an inauspicious 1-3 start to the season, the Bears rebounded to win 7 of their last 10 games, including a Homecoming win over Georgia Tech (that featured a flea flicker touchdown pass from J.J. Joe to Melvin Bonner), a win over Texas (who were stopped on a 4th and 4 in the closing seconds - we rushed the field and tore down the goalposts) and a win over Arizona in the Sun Bowl. This was Great Teaff's last year as head coach and it marked Baylor's last bowl victory until 2011. As a college football fan who'd suffered through years of terrible Mizzou football, this was the first time one of my college football teams actually had a winning season since I was in elementary school. I loved those football Saturdays under the scorching Central Texas sun at The Case, so I couldn't leave this team off the list.
7. 2019-20 Baylor Bears Men's Basketball - This one should probably have an asterisk next to it, due to the whole coronavirus pandemic because this team never got the chance to play in the Big Dance, a tournament in which they were likely going to be one of the top two seeds in one of the regions. So, perhaps the pandemic and the cancellation of March Madness robbed me of seeing Baylor advance to the Final Four for the first time since the 1940s? In that case, this team would be ranked much higher than #7. Of course, there's also the chance that this team would have suffered an embarrassing upset in the 1st round, in which case they might be ranked worse than #7. We'll never know. However, what we do know is that this was a GREAT team that accomplished a lot before the season was cut short. They not only ascended to the #1 ranking in the country, they held that ranking for 5 weeks, a school record. They set a record for the longest consecutive win streak in Big 12 history. They not only finally beat ku at Allen Fieldhouse, they did so by double digits. They racked up more quality non-conference wins than anybody in the country, including wins over the likes of Butler, Villanova, Florida and Arizona. This was the epitome of what a basketball team SHOULD be - an unselfish group of players for whom a different player seemed to star almost every game. They played tenacious defense and featured arguably the best backcourt in the country. We may never know how much this team could have accomplished, but they did enough over the course of the regular season to make the list.
6. 2009-10 Baylor Bears Men's Basketball - They won a then school record 28 games and advanced to the Elite Eight for the first time in more than 50 years. They very well might have advanced to the Final Four if it hadn't been for a couple of brutally bad calls in the Elite Eight game against Duke. Regardless, just two years after making the NCAA tournament for the first time in 20 years, Baylor won 3 games in March Madness and truly proved that Baylor basketball could not only compete in the Big 12 but they could compete at the highest level nationwide. In addition to all they accomplished on the court, this team had some of the great player names of all time: LaceDarius Dunn (19.6 ppg), Tweety Carter (15 ppg, 6 apg), Ekpe Udoh (13.9 ppg, 9.8 rpg) and Quincy Acy (9.3 ppg, 5.1 rpg). Three players from this team were eventually drafted and played in the NBA.
5. 2011 Baylor Bears Football - If the #6 team is the one that put Baylor basketball on the map, this is the team that put Baylor football back on the map and resulted in a beautiful, brand new, riverfront football stadium being built. This was the team that featured Baylor's first Heisman Trophy winner (Robert Griffin III), that beat Oklahoma in a thriller and that routinely put up scores that made it difficult to tell if it was a football game or a basketball game. They could score against anyone, though they admittedly couldn't stop anyone from scoring, either. Regardless, with 10 wins, a Heisman Trophy winner and the school's first bowl victory since the aforementioned 1992 Sun Bowl, this team was a blast to watch and finally gave Baylor fans some bragging rights on fall weekends.
4. 2011-12 Baylor Lady Bears Basketball - Perfection. The first men's or women's basketball team to go 40-0. An undefeated season, another national championship and the most lethal one-two guard-center punch in the country. Led by Britney Griner and Odyssey Sims, this team was unstoppable. Nobody in the country could consistently guard either player and they could burn you from the inside with Griner's height or burn you from the outside with Sims's quickness. It's not very often you see perfection in any sport and this is the only time I've ever seen it from one my teams.
3. 2007 Missouri Tigers Football - I grew up rooting for Mizzou sports and, for most of my life, Mizzou football was like a bad joke. Consider that, between 1984 and 2002, Mizzou had a grand total of 2 winning seasons in 19 years (including 13 consecutive losing seasons) during that streak. I remember the "Norman Conquest" (a 77-0 loss to Oklahoma in 1986) and a 63-6 loss to Nebraska in 1991. I remember the infamous "Fifth Down Game" loss to Colorado and the heartbreaking "Flea Kicker" loss to Nebraska. For most of my life, Mizzou football had been synonymous with awful teams and terrible losses. But that changed under Gary Pinkel, whose teams racked up 10 winning seasons in a 12 year span between 2003 and 2014. And the peak of those glorious years was the 2007 team, which won a school record 12 games en route to a Big 12 North Division title, a Cotton Bowl victory and, most miraculous of all, a brief turn as the #1 ranked team in the country. Led by QB Chase Daniel (who finished 4th in Heisman Trophy balloting) and featuring 2 first-team All Americans (TE Martin Rucker and WR/KR Jeremy Maclin), this team was blast to watch. They finally beat Nebraska and clinched the Big 12 North title (and the aforementioned #1 ranking) after a heart stopping Border War win over the hated kansas Jayhawks at Arrowhead Stadium in Kansas City. Gary Pinkel had a number of really good teams (include 4 division winners between 2007 and 2014), but this one has a warm spot in the hearts of all Mizzou football fans.
2. 1993-94 Missouri Tigers Basketball - This was the best Mizzou basketball team I've ever seen. They got off to a rough start in the season, including a brutal 120-68 thrashing against eventual national champion Arkansas, but then turned it around. They went undefeated (14-0) in the Big 8 to win their 15th and (thus far last) conference title and made it all the way to the Elite Eight before bowing out in a loss to Arizona. Missouri native and true son Norm "Stormin' Norman" Stewart stormed the sidelines for the Tigers for 38 years and this was his last great team before retiring in 1999. It featured Jevon Crudup, Melvin Booker, Derek Grimm and a cocky freshman named Jason Sutherland. All of those things are reason enough to rank this team very highly. But this team also gave me the best basketball game I've ever seen live, a 108-107 triple OT win over Illinois in the 1993 Braggin' Rights game, the last to be played at The St. Louis Arena. I still get chills thinking about the atmosphere and intensity of that game (keep in mind, the crowd was split 50/50 between Mizzou fans and Illinois fans and the pep bands for both teams were there), so the back-and-forth nail biter had more suspense and an a wilder atmosphere than you get in the usual college game. It was the first time that I was physically exhausted after a game that I only watched as a fan. That game alone boosts this team a little higher in my rankings, all the way up to #2.
1. 2013 Baylor Bears Football - Perhaps the greatest Baylor football team of all time, they were ranked as high as #3 in the country on their way to an 11 win season. They won their first Big 12 championship, which was also their first outright conference title since 1980 and made the school's first-ever Bowl Championship Series appearance. Led by junior QB Bryce Petty (who had 32 TD passes and 14 TD runs against only 3 interceptions), this was the Baylor football team that finally exorcised demons and fulfilled the championship dreams of Baylor fans everywhere. To top things off, they clinched the conference title with a win over the hated Texas Longhorns in the last game in Floyd Casey Stadium history on a magical (if bitterly cold) December afternoon. It was a fitting end to a terrific season that will always fill a warm spot in my heart.
Honorable Mention: 2014 Baylor Bears football (back-to-back Big 12 champs and a ridiculous come-from-behind 61-58 win over TCU), 2012 Baylor Bears Men's Basketball (another trip to the Elite Eight), 2018-19 Baylor Lady Bears Basketball (another national championship)
There you have it - my top 10 favorite college sports teams of all time. I hope you enjoyed this walk down memory lane. M-I-Z and Sic 'em Bears!
