When Missouri offensive coordinator Derek Dooley turned on the film of the team’s loss at Vanderbilt, he didn’t find many things the Tigers did well. Speaking with reporters after the team’s practice Tuesday, he included his own coaching among the reasons for the 21-14 upset.
“I stunk,” Dooley said “We all didn’t play very well, coaches included. None of us played to our standard.”
Vanderbilt entered Saturday ranked last in the SEC in every major defensive statistical category, yet the Commodores largely stifled the Missouri offense. The Tigers failed to eclipse 300 total yards for the first time this season and never really threatened to extend their streak of scoring at least 30 points to 12 games. After the game, head coach Barry Odom said “for winning football, in a lot of areas, we weren’t close.”
Several on-field factors contributed to the struggles. The offensive line couldn’t create holes in the running game, the pass-catchers didn’t get enough separation from defenders and quarterback Kelly Bryant had his worst game in a Tiger uniform, completing just half his passes and throwing a critical interception in the end zone. The offense cost itself 59 yards of field position with six penalties, and Dooley said his play calling could have been better.
But more than any of those issues, Dooley believes the overriding problem was that Missouri simply didn’t match Vanderbilt’s intensity. Once again, he said he shares culpability.
“You can say, on every play, one guy (made the difference), every play, one guy,” Dooley said, “and typically when that happens, did we really come in with the right mindset? … If you come in, you lose your edge just a little bit, you play a team that’s backs against the wall, that’s what it looks like.”
The position group that likely could have benefited most from an increase in intensity, the offensive line, is also the area where Odom believes the offensive struggles began. Missouri had its share of issues up front during the first half of the season, especially in the running game, and the Tigers rotated players around the line as a result. But the unit looked to have its problems smoothed over against Ole Miss in Week Six, when Missouri ran for 233 yards and scored 38 points. Odom called the performance the best of the season for the offensive line.
A week later, the same starting five took the field in the same five spots against a Vanderbilt defense that had allowed 619 total rushing yards on 6.4 yards per carry in its last two games. Yet the Tigers couldn’t get the running game going. Missouri rushed for 153 yards on 40 carries, with 72 of those yards coming from Bryant. The inability to run the ball on early downs often put the Tigers in obvious passing situations, where they struggled.
"When you look at the breakdowns we had offensively in that game, one of them was our inability to run the football,” Odom said. “It starts up front. … We didn't play point of attack blocking.”
Center Trystan Colon-Castillo, who caused a bit of stir when he said fans should place less blame for the loss on Odom and more on him and his teammates, said the line struggled to pick up Vanderbilt’s run blitzes on first and second downs. He characterized the offensive line’s mistakes as “self-inflicted.”
“We didn’t really execute a lot of times on a lot of blitzes they brought, which kind of sucks, because we worked on those things,” Colon-Castillo said. “And we had a lot of self-inflicted wounds. Holding call, hands to the face, offsides, things like that. So after watching the film, you can definitely see why we lost the game.”
The penalties and lack of running room combined to put Missouri in difficult second and third down situations. The Tigers’ average distance on their 15 third downs: 10.4 yards. They only converted three of those 15 into first downs, with one of the conversions coming on a third-and-one.
“You got no chance when you’re in third-and-12 and third-and-13,” Dooley said. “We derailed ourselves a lot.”
The obvious passing situations made life difficult for Bryant, but he also didn’t help himself. Bryant struggled with accuracy on several throws, such as when he threw behind Johnathon Johnson on a third down in the first half or when he threw too high for tight end Albert Okwuegbunam down the seam, resulting in Okwuegbunam getting hit in the knee and flipped in the air. His interception, an ill-advised throw into double-coverage, ended a Missouri drive that had reached the Vanderbilt nine-yard line and gotten new life after a roughing the kicker penalty.
The early struggles seemed to sap Bryant’s confidence. Vanderbilt often dropped seven or eight defenders in coverage when it knew Missouri would pass, and Bryant looked uncomfortable standing in the pocket, trying to find an open receiver. Seemingly every dropback in the second half, he scrambled toward the sideline, not finding a matchup he liked and throwing the ball but also not keeping the ball and running.
Tuesday, Bryant said he was too eager to scramble; that he should have progressed through each of his reads before escaping the pocket. If no one was open, he should have taken advantage of the check-down receiver for an easy, short completion rather than hoping someone would come open downfield.
“Just wasn't going through my reads properly,” he said. “This is the biggest thing, just making sure I'm staying in the pocket, not scrambling when I don't have to, just checking it down, whenever they give me taking the little freebies.”
Bryant, who hadn’t completed less than 63 percent of his passes in any game this season until Saturday, said he simply needs to get back to playing “pitch and catch,” not trying too hard to make a play that isn’t there. He’s optimistic he and the offense as a whole will improve. Just like he comes out of wins finding things he could have done better, Bryant said his performance at Vanderbilt wasn’t totally bad, and he’s confident the mistakes he made are correctable.
“It’s never as good as you think, it’s never as bad as you think it is,” he said. “It’s somewhere in the middle. That’s just what coach Dooley always stresses to us as quarterbacks. So definitely errors that we can correct.”
Even as Dooley reviewed the game film and came away saying the Tigers “weren’t really good at anything,” he, too, found a cause for hope that the unit will get back to its old self this week against Kentucky.
“The only real positive that came out of it is it’s a reminder of how you’re one week away from being embarrassed when you play college football, and certainly in our league,” Dooley said. “... We’ve had a long stretch where we’ve played pretty good football, and sometimes you get to where, ‘hey, that couldn’t happen to us.’ Well, it’s a good reminder. We all need a little foot up our tail, a little humility, and we certainly got that from Vanderbilt.”
