Last season, Missouri won 11 games, finished eighth in the country and would have made the College Football Playoff if it had existed in the form it now does. For the last nine months, we’ve framed everything we’ve thought about the 2024 Mizzou football season in terms of getting to that point again and being one of 12 teams playing for a championship.
Right now, the only reason Missouri is talked about as a playoff team in 2024 is because of what it accomplished in 2023.
Let’s be clear, there are eight games left in the season. Missouri hasn’t lost any yet. Every goal the Tigers have is still on the table. The playoff is still an attainable thing for this team. But it’s going to have to be a lot better than it’s been so far.
Mizzou started Saturday as the No. 8 team in the country and ended it incredibly fortunate not to have lost to a Vanderbilt team that couldn’t beat Georgia State last week. There are a lot of things to take away from that. The most important one is that Missouri won.
“We’re 4-0, which is as good as we can be record-wise,” head coach Eli Drinkwitz said.
He’s right. The number under the letter L is still a zero. The number of teams that can say that in major college football dwindles every single week. That matters. Drinkwitz praised his team’s ability to come back and not give up despite a Vanderbilt team that put last week’s stunning loss in the rearview mirror and came to Columbia ready to play the role of spoiler. All those things are true.
So is the second part of Drinkwitz’s statement above: “We’re not as good as we can be play-wise.”
Missouri may very well drop a spot or even two in tomorrow’s polls. The Tigers will most likely still be a top ten team in the country. But the only real reason is because of where they started. If there were no preseason polls, would anybody watching this Tiger team identify it as one of the ten best in the sport? I don’t even think Drinkwitz would do that. Because, honestly, Missouri hasn’t done much of anything to prove it should be among the nation’s elite so far.
The Tigers had two layups (and don’t tell me Buffalo beat Northern Illinois which beat Notre Dame). They’ve played two major conference teams. They beat one by six and one by three in double overtime when the opponent missed a 31-yard chip shot field goal that would have sent Saturday’s game into a two-point conversion contest (if that had happened, you’d very likely be reading a column about how stupid it is that the chance to play for a championship is determined by something that isn’t even football). They’re wins. That counts. But nobody who has seen this team play for four weeks thinks it’s ready to compete for a title as it currently stands.
“It’s just not good enough,” quarterback Brady Cook said. “We got a lot of work to do.”
He’s right. A lot of the fault lies with Cook himself and virtually all of it (well, except for a healthy dose that should fall squarely on the shoulders of the head coach tonight) lies with the offense.
The good news is Missouri has time to get better. Every team says its bye week comes at a good time, but with Missouri it’s true. The Tigers have 13 days between now and a trip to College Station to face an imminently ordinary Texas A&M team. Missouri, of course, has been incredibly ordinary itself this season. Asked about that trip, Drinkwitz said there wasn’t one person thinking about the Aggies right now. “We got to take a long hard look at the Missouri Tigers.”
As long as we’re accentuating the positives, there’s some precedent for this. Last season, Missouri survived an ugly game against Middle Tennessee State, winning 23-19. Nobody thought much of the Tigers’ chances to do much more than claw their way to a fourth straight mid-tier bowl game under Drinkwitz the night after that one. Mizzou of course went on to go 9-2 the rest of the way with three wins over ranked teams and the only two losses to top 15 squads in down to the wire fashion. So if that team turned it around, this one can too.
“I actually thought about that,” Cook said when asked about similarities to the win over MTSU. “I don’t think it’s too far off. I think everybody knows we can be a lot better.”
But the truth is, the 2024 Tigers are going to have to prove they can do what the 2023 Tigers already did. They spent all offseason telling us last year was over and didn’t matter. And they’ve spent September talking about how they still have something to prove and nobody respects them and Game Day didn’t come to Columbia and they’re on the wrong TV channel. Last year’s accomplishments aren’t going to earn this year’s team anything.
Well, that’s not exactly true. They’ve earned this team a lofty ranking and national recognition that far exceeds what they’ve done on the football field so far. They’ve also earned the Tigers the burden of being judged differently than last year’s team was. I asked Cook if it was fair that this team is held to a different standard than the last couple he has quarterbacked.
“Yeah 100%,” he said. “We are held to a different standard. Our standard’s higher. We expect more. I expect more.”
So does everybody else. Which is why everyone in attendance on Saturday has spent the three hours since the game ended talking about everything that went wrong rather than patting Missouri on the back for winning a game it could have—and probably should have—lost.
We’re looking at this year through a different lens. Because Missouri is looking at it through a different lens. The path to a championship is wider than it’s ever been. Missouri returns a third-year starter at quarterback in his second season under an offensive coordinator that was considered one of the country’s top assistants a year ago with a receiving corps that has talked for months about how it thinks it’s the best in the country. The Tigers poured tons of resources into the transfer portal to pull out multiple starters on the offensive and defensive lines, in the backfield and the secondary. The message was clear: We have an opportunity to do something special and we’re going to go at it full speed.
So far, Mizzou hasn’t hit that speed. It’s sputtered and coughed. But the engine’s still running. You might not have a ton of confidence in the operation right now. There have been a couple of close calls. Missouri had to veer out of the way of minor danger last Saturday and near catastrophe this Saturday. It may have absorbed some dings and scratches, but the car still works and it’s pointed in the right general direction.
While we’ve spent all night breaking down what went wrong on Saturday, Drinkwitz has 13 days to do so. And to fix it (and maybe do some studying on how to handle the last two minutes of the half or the last 45 seconds of regulation while he’s at it). Make no mistake, if Missouri repeats Saturday night’s effort the next time it takes the field, there won’t likely be a silver lining to talk about afterward. Instead we’ll be talking about a team that no longer is undefeated and has removed all of its margin for error in the second half of the season. We’re not there yet. The Tigers have a chance to make Saturday nothing more than a blip on the radar, Middle Tennessee v2.0.
They did it last year. That was 2023 and it now means nothing. It’s 2024 and Missouri once again has something to prove. Last season is over. It gave you offseason momentum and hype. Now the Tigers better get to proving they deserve it this year.
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