On a day that Missouri had everything to play for, the Tigers showed up. It all went downhill from there.
Missouri was whipped at the beginning and the end of Saturday’s 35-3 loss to the Purdue Boilermakers. In between, they were whipped some more.
“We didn’t see this coming,” senior linebacker Eric Beisel said. “I’m kind of at a loss for words.”
“Any football game during the week you’re thinking it’s going to be a 35-3 game, you shouldn’t necessarily be playing football,” quarterback Drew Lock said.
“We know we’ve got a problem,” Beisel added. “The next step is fixing it.”
The Q word came up. It had to. Did Missouri quit?
“That’s one thing that we don’t do,” Lock said. “We don’t necessarily pull off, we don’t slack in effort. Ever.”
“We played hard,” senior captain Jordan Harold said. “But regardless, it’s an L. You’re never going to be satisfied with that.”
To be fair, it’s tough to quit when it starts as badly as it did on Saturday. It’s not like the Tigers got worse during the course of the game. They were awful from the start. Purdue took the opening kickoff 75 yards in 5:03. Mizzou went three and out. Purdue went 87 yards in 2:49. It was 14-0 before Damarea Crockett, the SEC's leading rusher through two weeks, set foot on the field. Mizzou got a first down and punted again. Purdue went 96 yards in 6:59. It was 21-0. The game was over. There was 3:50 left in the first quarter. How, head coach Barry Odom was asked, could he explain the start?
“I don’t know,” he said before trying. “I didn’t sense that in the locker room, in our final meeting at the hotel. Everything felt and looked and smelled right.”
“We came into the game pretty confident,” Terry Beckner Jr. said. “But obviously Purdue was a great team, great discipline and it worked for them.”
The loss to South Carolina hurt. That was a swing game that Missouri fans hoped could kickstart a bounce back season. But the optimists could point to a special teams meltdown and a couple of big plays that swung the momentum. Missouri didn’t look like a far worse team than the Gamecocks. It simply looked like one that made monumental errors at all the wrong times.
But this was different. Before the season, when you were drawing a map to whatever non-descript bowl game you hoped Mizzou would land in, Purdue was a win. In ink. Missouri not only didn’t win. They weren’t close. Purdue looked faster. It looked like it was playing harder. It looked better. A lot better.
This loss put absolutely everything in play for Missouri. And by everything, we mean up to and including 1-11. There are no certainties left. Connecticut is awful. The Huskies lost to Virginia by three touchdowns today. But were they any worse than Missouri? Idaho comes to Columbia for homecoming. The Vandals don’t bring much of a brand name, but they were 9-4 last year and it looks quite possible, nee likely, that Mizzou will be riding a five-game losing streak by then.
The most frustrating part for Missouri fans? Purdue did all of this with a coach in his third game at a program that has won nine games in the last four years. Jeff Brohm’s first game was a spirited 35-28 loss to Louisville and Heisman-winning quarterback Lamar Jackson. His second was a 44-21 thumping of Ohio. His team is playing inspired football and everything is on the table for the Boilermakers as well…but in a good way.
Barry Odom is in his second season. Missouri is not noticeably better in any phase of the game than it was in his first. If Saturday was your only data point, you’d be convinced it is quite a bit worse.
At one point, Missouri committed penalties on four consecutive “plays.” I use the quote marks because on only one of those did they get a snap off. They had a two straight false starts, a holding penalty and another false start. It became second and 23 for an offense that barely had 23 total yards until a last-minute first half drive. Until the closing minute, Missouri had the same number of first downs as punts.
So we’re back to that statement “it’s all on the table.” What does that mean? It means everything. All of the doomsday scenarios. Including the head coach’s job.
As the few hundred fans who were left at the end filed out of Memorial Stadium, it offered a bigger indictment of where the program is than the scoreboard. Interest was dinged in November of 2015. It dipped further during a 4-and-8 debut season for Odom. Coming into this year, only the die-hards were doing much other than counting down the days until they could see Michael Porter Jr. play for Cuonzo Martin in a Tiger uniform. And now even the die-hards are in danger of checking out.
"Hopefully they're loyal enough to come back to a team that's 1-and-2," Lock said. "I know that I went to a lot of games when Missouri wasn't necessarily good. If you're considered a fan or you're actually a fan you're going to come back and support us. It's not like we go out there and (say) 'We're gonna give the fans a bad show today. We're gonna lose the game today.' That's not what we do. We go out and we fight for this state. We fight for them. Sometimes it doesn't go our way."
Missouri has a $98 million renovation of the stadium which was approved last month and is set to begin immediately after the season. It is staring, in all likelihood, at a third consecutive losing season and quite possibly one that doesn’t feature and SEC win. Barring a turnaround that would rival the 2005 Independence Bowl, Odom will at best be on an uncomfortably hot seat headed into year three. At worst, Jim Sterk will be embarking on his second coaching search in ten months.
Where it goes over the next 12 weeks remains to be seen. There are nine games left in the season. Missouri remains hopeful because there is no other option. But how do they come back from this?
“That is a tough question,” Lock said. “It just comes with work ethic. I think we need to come in and treat every day like its our last. If we start doing that, then maybe things will flip around.”
“We’ve got to go back and figure out where we went wrong today,” Beisel said. “Because we’re almost there.”
Optimism still seems plentiful. But Missouri is running out of chances to show it’s anything more than empty talk.
“We still have time to produce some results,” Odom said. “We’ve got to find a way to get it done.”
