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On Monday night, Missouri announced that it would play a traditional basketball power that it has often struggled to beat. This Saturday, the Tiger football team will face the same task. The Kentucky Wildcats will always be known more for their prowess on the hardwood, but no program has been a bigger thorn in Barry Odom's side than Mark Stoops' Wildcats over the last three years.
In Odom's first season as Missouri's head coach, Benny Snell and Stanley "Boom" Williams led a 35-21 victory in which Kentucky ran for 377 yards. Two years ago, the Tigers saw a last minute drive fall 20 yards short thanks in part due to a lackadaisical spot of the ball that prevented one last shot at the end zone in a 40-34 loss in Lexington.
But never has the Wildcats' bite been more painful than it was a season ago. For the better part of three hours, everything was going so well. The Tiger defense was nearly pitching a shutout, the offense was doing just enough and the future leader of the program was watching from the student section. But nobody who saw them can erase the last six minutes from his mind. Nor do they necessarily want to.
"You got to remember it," Kelly Bryant said. "Always. You don't want to have that happen again."
Cale Garrett stuffed two consecutive Wildcat runs on fourth and 2 and Missouri got the ball back on its own three-yard line with 7:31 to go. As the students did their best to convince Bryant that Columbia was the place he should play his final year of college football, the Tigers took over leading 14-3 having thwarted what seemed like the Wildcats' last best chance and seemingly on their way to a second straight win and a 5-3 record.
Larry Rountree III ran three times for seven yards. Missouri had to punt. That was nothing new. All five drives Mizzou had had up to that point in the second half had gone three-and-out. But the defense had yielded only a field goal and had come up big every time it had needed to.
Corey Fatony booted a 57-yard punt that Lynn Bowden gathered in at his own 33...and then ran back 67 yards for Kentucky's first touchdown of the day. A failed two-point conversion left it 14-9 with 5:18 to go.
Missouri got the ball back...and held it for all of three plays and 68 seconds. Two incompletions to Johnathon Johnson were followed by a completion to Johnson a yard short of the sticks. Another Fatony boomer went 56 yards to the Kentucky 10. Mizzou covered this one well, throwing Bowden for a four yard loss.
With 2:38 to go, DeMarkus Acy intercepted a deep ball from Terry Wilson all the way back at the Tiger 27. A penalty moved the Tigers back nine yards, but all Mizzou had to do was pick up its first first down of the second half and the game was over. The Tigers couldn't do it. Damarea Crockett ran twice for eight yards and Kentucky called timeout with 1:41 to go. On third and two, Drew Lock rolled right and threw an incomplete pass on a play that Missouri fans are still arguing about 12 months later.
The Tigers punted the ball back to Kentucky, which hadn't thrown the ball particularly well all day, at its own 19. A Tre Williams sack on first down left the Cats 88 yards from the end zone with barely a minute to play.
Wilson then completed four consecutive passes, moving the Wildcats to the Mizzou 20. But Terez Hall sacked him on the next play, forcing UK to use its final timeout with nine seconds left and the ball on the Tigers' 27-yard line.
That's when things really got wild.
Playing a prevent defense where virtually everyone lined up on the goal line, Missouri watched Wilson hit Bowden, who scampered out of bounds at the Missouri 10 with time for one more play. It was a pass for Ahmad Wagner in the corner of the south end zone that was broken up by Acy. But the officials called the Tiger cornerback for pass interference, giving the Cats one untimed down. They used it to score on a two-yard pass to C.J. Conrad--one on which the Tigers thought offensive pass interference should have been called--giving them a 15-14 win that stunned everyone on the field and the 55,000-plus in the stands.
The loss was one of the most shocking in recent memory and arguably the most painful of Odom's tenure (at least to that point). The Tigers thought they got the wrong end of two calls on the final two plays, but nothing could change the result.
"That's one that you know sticks with a lot of guys that are still here," Odom said on Tuesday.
One of them might be Acy. But he says he views Kentucky no differently than any other team on Missouri's schedule.
"I feel like we owe everybody," he said this week. "Nobody's different than anybody. Obviously we remember the game last year, how that ended.
"Want to return the favor."
Another is Tyree Gillespie, who was in coverage on the winning touchdown pass. Linebacker Nick Bolton said on Tuesday that "Tyree, he remembers that one down there. He's been locked in on this one for a long time."
Gillespie will have to wait until the second half in Lexington on Saturday to get his revenge. He'll sit out the first half after being ejected from last week's game after a targeting hit on Vanderbilt quarterback Mo Hasan.
At the time, the loss to Kentucky seemed to signal the death knell of Missouri's season...if not more than that. The Tigers had fallen from 3-0 to 4-4 and were facing a road trip to Gainesville, FL as an underdog to Dan Mullen's resurgent Gators. The Tigers would win that one 38-17 and then three more to finish the regular season 8-4. It would reinforce Odom's ability to rescue a team from the edge of destruction and salvage a season.
"Hopefully we'll do it again, right?" Odom said with his team coming off a stunning 21-14 loss to Vanderbilt which it entered as a three-touchdown favorite. "You don't ever think that it's one person or one coach or one area. It's all of us collectively together. You know, I'm not in the position to place blame other than put it on me."
Of course, at the time, nobody knew Missouri would bounce back. If they were honest, nobody was sure that Odom would still be Missouri's head coach after the 2018 season. And nobody knew who the quarterback would be after Lock graduated either. Odom would answer the first question over the next four weeks. In the late hours of that Saturday night, his heart just ripped out by the Wildcats, he went about answering the second one.
"That weekend's pretty much why I'm here now," Bryant said. "Despite how the game went down, I'm here because of me taking a chance out here, taking a visit. Looking at the game, it was really a close game, came down to the last possession right there. Didn't go the way that they wanted it to."
Odom met that night with Bryant and Arkansas graduate transfer Jonathan Nance, who was also in town on his official visit. The two would forge a bond and commit to the Tigers within minutes of each other a little more than five weeks later, on December 5th.
"I don't remember what time the game got over exactly but it seemed like it was later by the time I finally got back to being around those guys," Odom said. "Obviously they saw how the game unfolded and tough loss, but they're mature guys and we talked some about the game, but also the big picture about how they could step in and help us.
"You talk about the things that they want to talk about with how they fit into our program."
The conversation resonated and Missouri landed both players. They've been key cogs in an offense that helped the Tigers win five straight games sandwiched between inexplicable upsets against Wyoming and Vandy. And now they will lead the Tigers to Lexington, trying not only to turn the 2019 season back around, but also to exorcise what has been Missouri's biggest demon over the last three seasons.
"We just got to win," Bryant said. "Just simple as that. Don't have to make it any more difficult than what it is."
