After nine long years, Mizzou's big game is back
It’s time to take the Missouri Tigers seriously.
To be fair, a lot of you reading this probably already were. Those around the country who weren’t should start.
Let’s get this out of the way: South Carolina isn’t very good. The Gamecocks are now 2-5 with the worst pass defense in the country and a non-functional offensive line. To that, I say, so what?
You know what happens when a good team plays a bad team? The good team dominates the game and makes the bad team look like a bad team. Missouri did that. South Carolina had lost to North Carolina by 14, Georgia by 10, Tennessee by 21 and Florida by two before Saturday. Missouri rolled to a 24-0 lead and then gifted the Gamecocks a field goal with 31 seconds left in the first half thanks to a roughing the passer penalty on third and long. At that point, the Tigers had outscored Carolina and Kentucky 62-7 over their last five quarters of football.
“That fast start decided the game,” quarterback Brady Cook said. “Proud of how we started and how we finished.”
The second half was pedestrian at best. Missouri didn’t get its initial first down until its third drive of the third quarter. The Tigers dropped a couple of snaps. A better team might have made it interesting. South Carolina couldn’t. The Tigers still outscored the Gamecocks 10-9 in the final two quarters, winning 34-12 and running their two-week margin to 72-33.
To paraphrase LSU coach Brian Kelly, sometimes you have to go to Columbia, Missouri and play like shit and come out with a win. And sometimes good teams don’t have to play four quarters to win a game.
“Good teams find ways to win,” Eli Drinkwitz said. “We’re not married to one thing.”
And make no mistake, Missouri is a good team. It can be better. To a man the Tigers said on Saturday we haven’t seen anything close to their best. But what they’ve given us has been pretty good.
There’s been a feeling building around this team. I live 1.3 miles from Faurot Field and a little more than that from the media parking garage. The commute, at least prior to the last couple of weeks, takes me about four minutes if I hit the stop lights. It took about five times that long on Saturday.
So Mizzou fans are noticing. The Tigers reported their third straight sellout on Saturday. The Block M looks more like a few spots of white rock between people. Two five-star recruits—one already committed to Mizzou and one almost certainly about to be—were on the sidelines.
It was a flashback to a happier time.
From 2006 to 2014, Missouri averaged more than nine wins a season. It won fewer than eight only once. Traffic jams and sellout crowds were the rule, not the exception. From the start of the 2015 season through last year’s Gasparilla Bowl, Mizzou went 47-51. After back to back SEC Championship Game appearances, Mizzou went 25-41 in league play over the next eight seasons.
That’s in the rearview mirror now. Missouri football is on a roll. Cook is one of the few Tigers who remembers those glory days. He used to come from St. Louis to watch Gary Pinkel’s teams play and dream of one day being one of the guys on the field.
“I think this tops it,” he said with a smile after throwing for 198 yards and a touchdown and running for 64 more and another score against the Gamecocks.
Drinkwitz already has the highest win total of his four years. The Tigers have matched the fourth-best record in school history through eight games. The 1960 team won its first eight (and technically didn’t lose one all year). The 1962 team was 7-0-1 in its first eight and way back in 1909, Mizzou finished 7-0-1, the lone blemish a 6-6 tie with Iowa State, in the Missouri Valley Intercollegiate Athletic Association.
Missouri fans have been waiting nearly a decade for a season like this. Whether it’s a special season or merely a very good one and a sizable step forward for the program will largely be determined in Athens, Georgia two weeks from today. The Tigers have next weekend off while No. 1 Georgia faces Florida in Jacksonville. If the Bulldogs bring back a victory in that one, the winner in Athens has the inside track to Atlanta and the SEC title game.
Will it take a better effort than Saturday’s to walk out of Athens a winner? Sure. And even that might not be enough. But don’t spend too much time worrying about what Missouri didn’t do well on Saturday. You’ll miss the bigger point doing that.
For nearly a decade, Missouri got used to games this big and seasons like this one. Absence, they say, makes the heart grow fonder. These games and these seasons have been absent for nine years. Now, finally, they’re back.
“Nothing. It really doesn’t mean anything,” Drinkwitz said when asked what the 7-1 start means. “Why stop now? We got a lot of games left and we’ve set up a November to remember.”
Indeed they have. Fourteen days from now Missouri will face the presumed No. 1 team in the country with absolutely every goal in its grasp. It’s the game the players came to Missouri to play. It’s the game that makes all of your hours on the road and dollars sunk into tickets and donations worth it. It’s the game that makes me love what I do. The team you love is going to play in a game the whole country will be watching.
After nine years gone, that game is back. How much fun is that?
PowerMizzou.com is a proud game day partner of Yuengling Traditional Lager the taste of game-time @yuenglingbeer #LagerUp.
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