Following Missouri’s 35-28 loss to Kentucky two weeks ago, Eli Drinkwitz repeatedly lamented Mizzou’s inability to “make one more play.” The Tigers came up one score short of a big road win that Saturday in Lexington. Fourteen days later, it happened again.
We can look for every reason Missouri fell to 2-2 on Saturday with a 41-34 overtime loss to Boston College. There is no shortage of reasons and they’re good ones. Missouri still can’t stop the run and at critical times they failed to stop the pass against BC backup quarterback Dennis Grosel. Missouri had just one penalty all day, then committed two critical ones on the drive on which the Eagles took the lead with 25 seconds left in regulation. Connor Bazelak threw two bad interceptions, including one on the first play of overtime that sealed Mizzou’s fate. Maybe Steve Wilks’ defensive scheme is partly at fault. Maybe Drinkwitz mismanaged the clock on BC’s last regulation drive. Maybe an offensive facemask penalty that never gets called actually helped the offense and hurt Missouri. Maybe the play call on the overtime interception was curious.
Those things all contributed. Change any one of them and Missouri might be 3-1 celebrating a Power Five road win. But that’s college football. When your team makes those plays, you ignore how close it was to a loss. When it doesn’t, you talk for a week (or longer) about how close it was to a win.
Missouri overachieved in Drinkwitz’s first season. There’s no disputing that. The coach himself constantly reminded everyone who had probably picked the Tigers to win two or three games that they won five. They deserve credit for that and they got it. But it was also often ignored that to get to 5-5 Missouri needed a miraculous goal line stand against LSU and a gutsy last-minute drive and Harrison Mevis field goal to beat Arkansas. The Tigers were two plays from 3-7…and there were no arguments to be made that they lost any games they could easily have won. The average margin of defeat in Mizzou’s five losses was 24 points.
The difference between 3-7 and a boatload of questions and 5-5 and unbridled optimism was two plays.
Fast forward ten months. Missouri was down seven points driving for a tying touchdown in Lexington. It came up one play short. The Tigers led by four with a minute left on Saturday and then had the ball with a chance to tie or win in overtime. They again came up a play short.
The difference between 2-2 and 4-0 is two plays.
In the end, this doesn’t matter. You are what your record says you are. Missouri is a .500 football team with a monstrous game against Tennessee that no longer looks like the sure win many had it marked as at the beginning of the season. None of the above is meant to gloss over that. It’s simply meant to illustrate that the line between good and bad is so thin it is nearly invisible.
For Missouri, part of the problem is that it has to be nearly perfect to come out on the right side of that line. That’s been illustrated twice in the first four weeks of the season. We’ve discussed Mizzou’s talent deficit against a lot of Power Five teams plenty of times over the last few years and we’ve shown our work through recruiting rankings. That still exists. But it’s more than that.
Offensively, Missouri is averaging 32 points and 419 yards against FBS competition. Those are solid numbers. They would put the Tigers squarely in the middle of the national rankings in both categories, probably a little higher if we subtracted everyone else’s FCS games. And it seems a little bit crazy to be worried about the offense on a team that has the worst Power Five defense in the country.
But Missouri fans have to worry about the offense precisely because it has the worst Power Five defense in the country. We’re a third of the way through the season and opponents are averaging more than six yards a carry and 270 yards a game on the ground against the Tigers. They’re averaging 32 points a game and have been able to throw just enough to be effective while running the ball right down the Tigers’ throats.
Because of all that, Mizzou’s offense needs to be nearly flawless to win games against good competition. And Missouri doesn’t have a flawless offense.
The Tigers hit a big play on the first play of the season against Central Michigan. They had a few of them against Southeast Missouri State. Other than that, the Tigers have largely had to dink and dunk their way to those solid but not spectacular offensive numbers.
Taking away Tyler Badie’s otherworldly performance and Michael Cox’s game against SEMO, the Tigers are averaging less than three yards per rush. In the two losses, Connor Bazelak is averaging 6.4 yards per passing attempt. Missouri had ten players catch a pass against BC. Exactly one of them averaged more than 12 yards a reception. For the season, four Tigers average more than 12 yards a catch, but only two of them average more than a reception per game.
Missouri lacks explosion on offense. That means they have to largely go down the field five yards at a time. It’s a tough approach to maintain because a single mistake can derail it. One negative play, one penalty, one drop can throw the whole thing off schedule. And when you don’t have players who can chew up big chunks of yardage at a time, those mistakes are often impossible to overcome.
Missouri didn’t make a lot of mistakes offensively in Saturday’s loss. Connor Bazelak really made only two. But the second was a game-ending interception on a throw that seemed highly out of character for an offense that seemed perfectly content to take its time moving down the field with a four-yard run here and a six-yard swing pass there. The Tigers took a risk and went for the end zone on the first play of overtime and it sealed their fate.
“It was a play-action throw and the quarterback went to that matchup, and it is what it is,” Drinkwitz said. “I’m going to have to watch the tape and see. He made his decision, i’m not going to after the fact coach him. I’ll watch the tape and then we’ll learn from it.”
Bazelak said he was just giving his receiver (Keke Chism) a chance to make a play. It’s precisely the thing many of us criticized him for not doing enough of during his first season as a starter and precisely the thing many of us said we’d need to see more of for Missouri’s offense to take the next step. He did what we asked and it didn’t work so it’s unfair to blame him for trying. You can dislike the execution without disliking the idea.
None of this is meant to blame the interception for the loss. Yes, it contributed. But there are countless other plays that could have been changed which would have avoided Mizzou ever being in that situation. And that’s precisely the point. Missouri has a decent offense trying to drag a dreadful defense to a good season. It’s a tough formula to make successful.
They’ve come close twice already. But close doesn’t count in college football. Missouri is 2-2, having lost two swing games. There are two almost certain losses left on the schedule (Georgia, Florida), one that looks a lot more difficult than it did four weeks ago (Arkansas) and one that looks a little easier but will still be a tall task (Texas A&M). If you started the season with dreams of eight or nine wins, you’ve probably adjusted that closer to six or seven. And even to get there, Missouri’s offense is probably going to have to be close to perfect. It’s simply got no margin for error.
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