Mizzou Basketball opens the 2026-27 campaign against Cleveland State, and the first game comes with a familiar face on the other sideline. Rob Summers, once a key assistant for Dennis Gates, now leads the Vikings into Columbia after a complete reset of the roster.
The opener matters because it is not just a new season; it is Gates hosting his old team to tip off the year. Summers spent two years at Miami (OH) before rejoining Gates for one successful season at Mizzou, then returned to Cleveland State to take over a program that went 11-22 last season and finished 6-14 in Horizon League play.
That record would already have made the rebuild difficult. The bigger problem is that every single player from Cleveland State's last squad is gone, which leaves Summers to piece together a team made largely of D-I transfers and freshmen. There is no carryover to lean on, no returning rotation to ease the transition and no reason to expect the opener to look like anything other than a first draft.
That is where the numbers behind the rebuild start to matter. Jason Crowe Jr., a freshman and the No. 7 recruit nationally in the 247Sports Composite, gives Cleveland State one kind of ceiling. Jamier Jones brings 11.9 points per game from Providence, Toni Bryant arrives as the No. 21 recruit nationally, and the rest of the rebuilt group adds production from places that rarely get bundled together this quickly: Mark Mitchell at 18.3 points per game, Bryson Tiller at 7.9, Trent Pierce at 10.4, Jordan Lowery at 4.6, Curtis Stinson Jr. at 1.4, Obie Bronston Jr. at 10.3, Rayvon Griffith at 4.0, Derek Vorst at 7.9 and Dre Jones at 4.3.
For Summers, that is both the job and the risk. He returns to Cleveland State after a stretch with Gates that included the coach's run in Cleveland, two years away at Miami (OH) and then a successful season back at Mizzou, but none of that guarantees continuity for this opener. Mizzou gets the first look at a team built from scratch, and Cleveland State gets its first real test under a coach who knows Gates' system well enough to make the night feel personal.
The next thing that matters is simple: whether Cleveland State can turn a roster overhaul into something functional before the season gets away from it, or whether Mizzou uses the opener to expose how much work still remains.
