Why Cuonzo Martin's hiring at Missouri is a gamble for both sides

Risk takers, unite.

Cuonzo Martin is taking a risk by accepting the Missouri basketball job. He’s going to a school with Academic Progress Rate issues that could affect postseason eligibility. He’s going to a school that has an ongoing investigation into claims from a former tutor that she did classwork for athletes – this coming while the basketball program is already on probation for violations that occurred during Frank Haith’s tenure. He’s going to a school that has put a terrible product on the floor for several years in front of thousands of empty seats, as a dissatisfied malaise settled over the fan base. He’s going to a school just now emerging from racially charged incidents and protests that nearly shook Mizzou’s famous quadrangle columns off their bases.

[Fill out your NCAA tournament bracket here | Printable version]

Missouri, meanwhile, is taking a chance by hiring Martin. It is giving a seven-year contract to a man who has never stayed more than three years in any job, hopscotching from Missouri State to Tennessee to California since 2008-09. It is giving a reported $3 million a year to a coach with a grand total of two NCAA tournament appearances in nine seasons, six of those seasons at bid-friendly Power Five conference schools. It is investing heavily in a coach who had huge recruiting coups at Cal but zero NCAA tourney victories to those for them.

So maybe this is a match in risk-taking heaven.

Maybe this is the perfect marriage – a struggling program meets a drifter coach, and they’re happy together forever after. Or for seven years. Or, hey, even four – Martin has never been any place that long, and Missouri hasn’t had a single coach win 20 games for four straight seasons since Norm Stewart from 1988-92.

The great intrigue now is whether Martin will pull off a Huskie heist that immediately upgrades Missouri’s talent level. With Washington firing Lorenzo Romar Thursday, it opened the door for Martin to potentially hire Romar assistant Michael Porter Sr., who happens to be the father of Huskies signee Michael Porter Jr., who happens to be the No. 1 player in the high school class of 2017, who happened to have lived in Columbia, Mo., from 2012-16 before moving to Seattle.

That seemingly also would put Missouri in position to land Michael Porter Jr.’s brother, Jontay, a four-star member of the Class of 2018. There even has been speculation about Jontay reclassifying to join his brother in college for the 2017-18 school year.

This would be a high-profile talent injection the likes of which Missouri hasn’t seen since it rather infamously tapped into Detroit in the late 1980s and early ’90s. (There are thick NCAA files on how that ended.) Fans are frenzied over the possibility, at a place where the prevailing emotions surrounding basketball for years have been apathy and disgust.

But the question is whether it would be a long-term solution or a short-term fix that might not fix anything at all.

If Michael Porter is as good as advertised, he’s a one-year college player. The recent history of middling programs that land allegedly transformative one-year players reveals little transformation.

Romar is out at Washington because his one season with Markelle Fultz, quite possibly the top pick in the June NBA draft, was a complete bust. The Huskies went 9-22, 2-16 in the Pac-12.

Last year, Johnny Jones landed eventual No. 1 pick Ben Simmons and also missed the NCAA tournament. Jones should have been fired for that, but held on for one more miserable season before being canned earlier this month.

And you have to look at Martin himself. When he stunned the recruiting world by bringing in five-stars Jaylen Brown and Ivan Rabb to Cal in 2016, expectations soared. The Golden Bears were good – 23-11 overall, 12-6 in the league – but flopped in the first round of the NCAA tournament against Hawaii. Then Brown left for the draft lottery.

Rabb stayed for a second season at Cal, but his sophomore year didn’t yield much fruit. The Bears went 21-13 with a user-friendly non-conference schedule, 10-8 in the league, and missed the NCAAs after a late slide. They were handily beaten Tuesday in a first-round NIT game by Cal State-Bakersfield.

By then, Martin-to-Mizzou already was in the works. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported that Missouri athletic director Jim Sterk flew to the Bay Area Sunday, and sources told Yahoo Sports that Martin met with Cal administrators Monday. By Wednesday afternoon, the deal was done and Mizzou had its man.

The interesting thing is who else Missouri might have been able to land.

Indiana coach Tom Crean is in an embattled position, with three years left on his contract and no extension coming this spring. It’s possible (though not certain) that a two-time Big Ten champion coach with a Final Four on his résumé would have come to Columbia. But Mizzou had its sights set on Cuonzo Martin.

Maybe Sterk zeroed on the right guy all along. Maybe Missouri and Martin are perfect for each other, two wandering entities in search of what will bring out the best in each other.

But it’s a risk. A two-way risk.

More on Yahoo Sports:
• Charles Robinson: Adrian Peterson’s frosty free agency tour continues
• Former President Obama fills out his NCAA tourney bracket
• Dan Wetzel: Coaching lifer finds a home at Florida Gulf Coast