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COLUMBIA, Mo. — Missouri has become a popular pick in March Madness brackets, but in unfortunate fashion. The Tigers are a trendy upset pick around the college basketball world.

ESPN’s “The People’s Bracket� shows that 40% of the bracket filled out on its site have No. 11 seed Drake upsetting No. 6 seed Mizzou in Thursday’s 6:35 p.m. NCAA Tournament game in Wichita, Kansas. That’s the most upset picks of any of the 6-11 matchups, though two of those are dependent on First Four games to lock in the 6 seeds’ opponents.

And Drake is a difficult team to make sense of. The 30-3 Missouri Valley Conference champions are an appealing pick mostly because of the raw number of wins they’ve acquired. The Bulldogs have a clear style and tempo (slow), an NBA prospect in guard Bennett Stirtz and the buzz that a mid-major program or two discovers during the days after the bracket reveal.

So how do the Tigers prove the 40% wrong and beat Drake to make the second round, where No. 3 seed Texas Tech (25-8) or No. 14 seed North Carolina-Wilmington (27-7) awaits? Minimizing mistakes to let the talent gap prevail.

Drake enters the Big Dance with the title of slowest team in America, though the better superlative is probably “most patient.� Each Bulldogs possession takes 22 seconds on average, which is the longest of the 364 Division I teams — Missouri, for comparison, has an average possession length of 16.5, and the D-I average is 17.6.

It’s not that Drake stands around playing keep away until the shot clock gets serious, though. The Bulldogs will be relaxed getting the ball across half-court, then run half-court offensive actions like any other team.

Drake particularly loves to set up high ball screens in the middle third of the floor, letting Stirtz run the pick and roll right down the lane. If that doesn’t work the first time, he’ll dump the ball off, cut back around to the top of the key and reset. The repetition seems to be a challenge to the other team not to make a mistake when defending the common play.

Stirtz is a savvy passer who is fully capable of reading what the defense lays out in front of him. He’ll punish overzealous help defense by bounce-passing the ball out to the uncovered player. He can make shots over drop coverage, and time pocket passes into the roller if there’s space.

Because of the Bulldogs’ slower tempo, they do find themselves in late-shot clock situations where a desperation shot is necessary. That often comes at the rim, where a Drake player will go up into contact looking for a foul to get something out of the possession, and it works — Drake is 11th in the country in getting 0.43 free throws per field goal attempt, a metric in which MU is second in the nation at 0.47.

Defensively, Mizzou is prone to fouling — especially when relying on help defenders to come over from the corner or step up into action from the low post. It became an especially jarring issue late in the regular season.

“We’ve got to be able to rotate early and not reach,� Tigers coach Dennis Gates said before the regular-season finale against Kentucky. “Sometimes being out of position is the cause, the root cause, of fouling because you’re trying to catch up, trying to hold.�

Crisper rotations and verticality down low will be key to defending Drake’s antics late in the shot clock. The Bulldogs don’t have a player taller than 6-feet-8 on the roster, so MU should be able to play sound defense based on its size advantage — assuming it can get the positioning part down.

And because Stirtz looks so comfortable running the pick and roll, throwing different coverages out at him would be valuable in trying to unsettle his process of reading the defense. Power forward Mark Mitchell, who usually starts games as an undersized center for Missouri, can handle switching duties out of ball screens. Guards like Anthony Robinson II and Tony Perkins can fight around screens, too. Can center Josh Gray, who as a 7-footer will be the tallest player on the floor by a substantial margin, hold up in those situations? His performance could be a bellwether for how the Tigers handle Drake’s offense.

As far as Mizzou’s offense goes, minimizing mistakes will be crucial on that end of the floor too. Drake leads the country in steal rate, turning 14.6% of opponent possessions into steals. MU, for context, is 10th in the nation at 13.4%. In a game that, because of Drake’s slow tempo, will likely see fewer possessions than a typical Missouri game, every turnover becomes a little bit more impactful. That’s not a March cliché — it’s the math of a 61-possession game versus a 71-possession game.

The Bulldogs will defend passing lanes to play for deflections and interceptions, perhaps at the expense of leaving a shooter like Caleb Grill open. Drake defenders are prone to moments of flat-footedness, which allows drives to the rim to work fairly well.

Can Mizzou keep its passing crisp and rely on drives to get inside? Players like Mitchell, Perkins and Tamar Bates can certainly excel with that as the emphasis. If they’re clicking, it’ll be difficult for Drake to keep up.

The key to avoiding an upset is avoiding preventable mistakes. If Missouri can do that, its size and overall roster quality should prevail over the Bulldogs.