The countdown is on for tipoff at Enterprise Center.
No. 10-seed Missouri basketball will take on 7-seed Miami on Friday night in St. Louis in the first round of the NCAA Tournament. Mizzou’s third trip to the Big Dance in the past four seasons under head coach Dennis Gates is scheduled to tip off at 9:10 p.m. CDT and will air on TruTV.
This will be Miami’s first March Madness berth since it made the Final Four in the 2022-23 season.
Here are seven things to know about the Hurricanes ahead of Friday’s game:
Who is Miami’s head coach?
After working as an assistant at Duke for the past three seasons, and at Kentucky and Texas before that, Jai Lucas took over Miami as a first-time head coach at this time last year.
That means Lucas, 37, has worked under John Calipari, Rick Barnes, Shaka Smart and Jon Scheyer.
Lucas’ father, John Lucas II, was a coach in the NBA for more than 30 years, including head coaching stops at the 76ers, Spurs and Cavaliers.
Jai Lucas also helped coach Missouri star Mark Mitchell in his first two seasons of college basketball at Duke.
Former Mizzou assistant on Miami staff
Gates’ former top assistant, Charlton ‘C.Y.’ Young is now Lucas’ assistant head coach at Miami, after returning to his hometown in April last year.
Young worked with Gates at Florida State as assistants between 2013-19. Gates made him his top assistant at Mizzou when he was hired in Columbia.
There is another connection on the Miami roster, as former Mizzou wing Marcus Allen now is with the Hurricanes. He will not play in the first-round game, as he was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma, a type of blood cancer, in December.
Miami went 8-2 on the road this season
Think the Hurricanes are fazed about playing Missouri in front of a home-state crowd?
“They could have put us on the moon,” Lucas told CBS Sports Network on Monday. “We’re still going to show up, lace up and do what we do. You know, for us, it really didn’t matter. We won eight road games and we did it in big environments. This is a road game. It’s no different, and we’ll go business as usual.”
Miami was 8-2 on the road and 2-3 in neutral sites this season. That means the Hurricanes were 10-5 away from their home floor over the course of the year.
Four of those five losses were against ranked teams, coming against Florida, BYU and Virginia on the road and in the ACC Tournament. The other loss was to NCAA Tournament 8-seed Clemson.
Excellent point guard is Ant Robinson’s ex-teammate
Michigan transfer and senior Miami point guard Tre Donaldson is going to give Missouri a real test in the backcourt.
Donaldson is averaging 16.5 points and 5.8 assists per game. He was also Missouri point guard Anthony Robinson II’s teammate under head coach Charlie Ward, a former FSU point guard and Heisman Trophy winner, at Florida State University High in Tallahassee, Florida.
Miami was a 7-win team one year ago
The biggest year-over-year turnaround in the NCAA Tournament this season is Miami, which won seven games in the 2024-25 season.
The Hurricanes have 25 wins so far this season. That’s 18 more than before Lucas arrived in Coral Gables.
So, the biggest turnarounds in each of the past two tournaments are facing off Friday.
Mizzou staged one of the biggest turnarounds in NCAA basketball history to get back to the Big Dance last season, going from winless in conference play to a 22-win outfit and a 6-seed in March.
Similar style of basketball on deck
There is going to be an intriguing battle on the inside Friday, as both of these teams are going to attack the paint pretty regularly.
The Hurricanes average the third-most points in the paint per game in Division-I basketball, according to CBB Analytics. Missouri is in the 97th percentile in that category.
Miami has 6-9 forward Malik Reneau, who averages 18.8 points and 6.6 rebounds per game. MU has Mitchell, a 6-9 forward who leads the team in scoring (18.3), rebounds (5.2) and assists (3.6).
Miami shoots and makes the fewest 3-pointers per game in the ACC. Mizzou shoots the third-fewest in the SEC.
And, here’s an important one: Miami averages 22 trips to the free throw line per game, and Missouri averages 24. Both of those are above the D-I average.
So, watch for that interior offense. Who can create the most down low and downhill? Who can knock down a couple early 3-pointers to let the bigs operate in some space? Who can get free shots at the stripe? That’s where the separation is almost certainly going to come from.
Miami’s résumé
Miami was 25-8 overall and 15-3 in ACC play. The ’Canes beat Louisville in the ACC Tournament before losing to Virginia in the semifinals.
The Hurricanes were the No. 32 team in the NET, carrying a 12-8 record in Quad 1 and 2 games. They had three Quad 1A wins, which came at SMU and NC State and on a neutral floor against Louisville.
This article originally appeared on Columbia Daily Tribune: 7 things to know about Miami before Missouri takes on ’Canes in March