A season unlike any other
In a perfect world (insert blue font, nothing at all about 2020 has been perfect) Missouri will open football camp in 12 days. It would be the 18th fall camp for the Tigers I would be covering. Except, of course, I almost certainly won't be covering it.
In this pandemic world of sports, even when sports happen, nobody can watch them in person. And even in the big, bad, football-starved SEC, nobody is broadcasting football practice (although there are actually worse things that probably get viewers on the SEC Network).
Eli Drinkwitz has been Missouri's coach for nearly eight months. He has held three practices. One of those involved full pads. The media saw about 45 minutes of that practice. That is the extent of our knowledge about this team.
This site is for the die-hard Missouri fan. We write more about the third-stringers than the starters because you guys already know everything about the starters. The 2021 class is three-quarters full, which means many of you have already moved on to the 2022 class. It's what we do here. While there are plenty of places to get the surface level coverage, we have prided ourselves for nearly two decades now on being the place that covers all the stuff the casual fan doesn't care about.
That's a long way of saying the people on this site tend to have encyclopedic knowledge of Missouri football and basketball because you care more than most people. As of July 26th, 12 days from the start of fall camp, here is what we know about Missouri football:
*Larry Rountree III will, health willing, lead Missouri in carries
*Nick Bolton will start at middle linebacker
*There will be 20 other players, ten on offense and ten on defense, who will join them.
We can make some educated guesses like Damon Hazelton will probably start at wide receiver and Tyree Gillespie and Joshuah Bledsoe are likely the starting safeties. But those might not fall into the "We know this beyond a shadow of a doubt" category because there is a new coach. Everything is different. And we have nothing on which to base opinions at this point in time.
How do you guess who is going to be the starting quarterback when none of the quarterbacks has played a full game at Mizzou and the coaches have mostly never coached one? How do you know who's going to kick or punt or replace the departing offensive or defensive linemen? How do you know what the scheme is going to look like or what the coach will lean on when he's in a tight situation?
It seems fitting for 2020. We don't know if there are going to be games. If there are games, we don't know if there will be fans at those games or who the opponents will be. We don't know if we will be allowed to cover them or talk to the players about them. If we don't know even the most basic things about this season, how could we know anything more specific?
This is all a very long way of saying this is going to be a season unlike any other. In some ways, it's like we all cover Kansas State at the height of Bill Snyder's success. My friends that actually did that used to joke they found out who the starters were when the team took the field for the first game. Snyder was notorious for holding on to the information about his program as if he was guarding Fort Knox. Everybody's Fort Knox now, especially those with a new coach.
If we're lucky enough to have games, those of us who are paid to be experts on Missouri football are going to be learning right alongside the rest of you. We'll know more when we have something on which to base that knowledge. Anybody writing a lot about what's going to happen or what it will look like is simply making it up at this point. That's not meant as a shot at anyone that's doing that. We're going to start our own position previews on this site on Tuesday. Everybody has to have content, even when there are no sports to provide it. So we're all going to do it. In good times we are basing what we write on having a fraction of the information. Whatever that fraction has been in the past, it's now non-existent.
If we're fortunate enough to get to a season--whether that's on September 5th against Central Arkansas or the 12th against Vandy or the 19th against South Carolina or any other potential date and opponent that might be on the table--it's going to be a season that we will all have to watch differently. Not only are we not going to know anything going into it, but we shouldn't really draw any conclusions from what happens.
Eli Drinkwitz had coached his team for about six hours before last week. He is currently able to do some workouts with them. I think they might have even gotten to start using a ball here recently. But for four months, all he could do was chat with them on Zoom. He couldn't even ask them if they were working out. I know it's folly to ask fans on a site that caters to the die-hards of the die-hards to have patience and approach games with some understanding, but I'll just tell you here in late July that I can't possibly see anything that I will hold against Drinkwitz this year.
The victory will be in playing games. Winning them would be nice. It will certainly be the goal. But you'll see no judgment from me if it doesn't happen. How can you judge someone when he has had all the tools necessary to do his job stripped away by a virus?
If things go well, camp is less than two weeks away and games are less than two months away. What can you expect? Don't ask me. I don't have a clue.
573tees.com is an online apparel shop for all things Mid-Missouri. Expressing yourself has never been easier with one of our pre-designed print-on-demand t-shirts, hats and hoodies or a customized one just for you for any occasion. As a powermizzou.com member save 20% on your next T-Shirt by clicking here: POWERMIZZOU DISCOUNT