A lot of times, Kim English lets his hands do the talking.

He’s a prolific Twitter-er whose online musings are both frequent (he tweeted 27 times one day last week) and entertaining (“If you invent a teleporter and get it to this airport in Lexington, Ky. And teleport us back to Columbia. I’ll give you tix for rest of year”). English has emerged as the team’s de facto spokesman, a guy willing to offer his opinions on everything from “Temple Run” to college basketball analysts.

It’s what he has done between tweets, though, that has endeared him to a sometimes-fickle Mizzou fan base.

Despite a bevy of preseason concerns regarding the program’s ability to succeed under first-year head coach Frank Haith, English has been a tour de force in Missouri’s 17-1 start and No. 5 national ranking.

Through 18 games, English has averaged 14.6 points, 4.6 rebounds and 1.5 assists per game. He has played both on the perimeter and in the post, in part because the injury to standout forward Laurence Bowers resulted in a substantial hit to the team’s front-court depth. Perhaps most notably, he has helped ease outsider concerns regarding Haith.

“I knew how good of a coach he was,” says English, who’ll take the court in the team’s biggest game of the year on Saturday when the Tigers travel to Waco, Texas, for a 1 p.m. matchup with No. 3 Baylor. “I just knew he needed some players.”

Between English, senior guard Marcus Denmon and Ricardo Ratliffe, the Tigers certainly seem to have plenty of players. And thanks to a circle-the-wagons approach spawned during a tumultuous preseason, they’ve managed to block out the outside rumblings while putting themselves in position to make a run at the first Big 12 regular season title in program history.

“We don’t care what the media says,” English says of the team’s success this season. “That’s irrelevant. All we cared about was winning and getting a little bit better everyday.”