Continued offensive struggles characterize another road flop

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LEXINGTON, Ky. — Missouri head coach Barry Odom was desperate for something, anything, to jump start his sluggish offense. For the second week in a row, Missouri had taken the field looking sloppy and flat on the road against an SEC East foe, especially on the offensive side of the ball. When the Tigers received a Kentucky kickoff with 44 seconds left before halftime, Odom opted not to simply run the ball and send the game to halftime, instead braving the deluge pelting Kroger Field and calling for a pass in hopes that the Tigers could put some points on the scoreboard before the Wildcats got the ball back to begin the second half.

The drive started with promise, as quarterback Kelly Bryant hit receiver Jonathan Nance for nine yards on first down. Missouri used its first of three timeouts. But when Bryant tripped over right guard Case Cook’s feet and fell to the turf for a loss of six, the Tigers’ hopes of scoring before the end of the half figured to be extinguished.

Yet Odom called his second timeout. That gave Kentucky’s vaunted pass rush, which had already recorded three sacks in the opening 30 minutes, another chance to harass Bryant. Edge rusher Jordan Wright delivered. Wright beat left tackle Yasir Durant and hit Bryant’s right arm, forcing the football high into the air. Wright then fell on the football to give Kentucky the ball back on the Missouri 20-yard line with 22.8 seconds still on the clock.

Following a facemask penalty on Jordan Elliott, Lynn Bowden, Kentucky’s wide-receiver-turned quarterback, broke a couple tackles around the line of scrimmage and dove into the end zone to extend the Wildcat lead to 22-0. Missouri wouldn’t recover, as Kentucky cruised to a 29-7 victory to drop the Tigers to 5-3, with all three defeats coming away from Columbia.

After the game, Odom essentially said his decision to call the second timeout was borne out of desperation to jump start the offense.

“I wanted to give an effort there to try and go get some points, and obviously looking back now, shouldn’t have taken it, right? But in the moment of when we took the timeout, I felt like we had an opportunity there before half to try to get a little bit of momentum. … I was trying to do everything that we could with the possessions we had and trying to find a way to move the ball. Obviously it didn’t work out.”

Durant put the blame for the disastrous result on his own shoulders.

“That was all on me,” Durant said. “I take pride in not letting nobody get to the quarterback, and I did a shitty job with that play, and I cost us seven points.”’

The final drive of the first half was the low point for the Missouri offense, but certainly not the only time the Tigers struggled. Missouri entered last week’s game at Vanderbilt having scored 30 points in 11 consecutive games. Last week, the Tigers mustered just 14, along with a season-low 297 total yards.

Saturday saw new low-water marks. Missouri’s 289 yards of offense were the fewest in a game since last season’s 15-14 loss at Kentucky, 364 days ago. Odom, who has yet to beat the Wildcats in his four years as Missouri’s head coach, appeared at a loss for explanation of the offensive struggles in his postgame interview other than to point out that the Tigers didn’t do much of anything well, outside of one play. A quarter of the team’s yardage and all seven points came on a 73-yard screen pass to Tyler Badie.

“Weren’t very good in in the pass game and then didn’t do enough in the run game to get anything going offensively,” Odom said. “That’s really disappointing, in a lot of ways, back to back weeks on not having the opportunity to drive the football or find ways to get a first down.”

Only exacerbating Missouri’s offensive struggles, the Tigers now face uncertainty at quarterback. Bryant, the graduate transfer from Clemson who Odom declared the starter virtually as soon as he stepped on campus, left the game midway through the third quarter in favor of redshirt sophomore Taylor Powell. Odom said the staff removed Bryant due to injury. Bryant did come up limping after a scramble in the first quarter, clutching at his right hamstring, but he played the following seven series before Powell took the reins.

“He couldn’t move the way he needed to to function,” Odom said by way of explanation.

The change behind center ultimately did little to stem the offensive ineptitude, for which fault was widespread. The offensive line allowed five total tackles for loss and drew three penalties. Bryant looked hesitant to throw downfield and got stripped twice in the pocket. And the pass-catchers did their quarterback no favors, dropping a whopping seven passes. While the weather certainly wasn’t ideal for an offensive outburst, players said those are plays they have to make, especially against a defense as stingy as Kentucky’s.

“You can use an excuse and blame it on the weather, but bottom line is as receivers we’ve gotta catch the ball,” said tight end Albert Okwuegbunam, who contributed one drop on his only target.

Despite the lopsided halftime score, Missouri wasn’t without chances to get back in the game. The defense forced a three-and-out to open the second half, and three plays later, Badie showed off his blazing speed on his 73-yard catch and run. The play, Missouri’s only gain of more than 20 yards, cut Kentucky’s lead to two scores. Then, on the Wildcats’ next possession, Bowden lost his second fumble of the game and Joshuah Bledsoe recovered at the Kentucky 44-yard line.

A holding penalty on right tackle Larry Borom put Missouri behind in first-and-20. Then receiver Kam Scott, who had ball security issues all night in the wet weather, caught a pass but got stripped of the ball. Missouri recovered, but what should have been a gain of about 10 yards turned into a loss of two. Finally, after a short completion to Johnathon Johnson, Bryant scrambled out of the pocket but simply through the ball away.

The three-and-out marked the second time the Tigers recovered a Bowden fumble with positive field position and failed to turn it into points. It also represented the end of the night for Bryant, a sign that the coaching staff was waving the white flag — or at least tying it to the flagpole. Center Trystan Colon-Castillo called the series “draining.”

“Defense gets a stop, gets a turnover, gets the ball back,” Colon-Castillo said. “You have great field position and it feels great. You can feel the tide turning, feel like all the energy is on your side, your favor. And then a penalty, dropped balls, missed assignment just kind of derails it all, and obviously it showed. It’s just kind of one of those things that’s really demoralizing.”

Bryant finished the game 10 of 19 for 130 passing yards, which undercut his 140-yard performance from a week earlier as his lowest output of the season. More than half of those yards, of course, came on one play. Odom noted that Bryant was hurt by at least five dropped passes, but for the second week in a row, the Tigers’ starter struggled mightily to connect downfield.

Powell, meanwhile, finished four of 10, but he did give Missouri one last hope when he led the team inside the Kentucky 20-yard line for the first time all game. The Tigers got all the way to the Wildcat 17 when, on fourth and two, Powell fired a bit low for Dominic Gicinto and the ball bounced off his lower body and incomplete.

The play served as a microcosm of the evening: The execution wasn’t perfect, but in spite of that, Missouri had a chance to make a play and finally force Kentucky to sweat. Instead, like when Bryant was stripped late in the first half and when Tucker McCann missed an early field goal, the ball wound up lying on the soggy turf and the Wildcats danced in the downpour.

“We flat out just got our butts whooped,” Colon-Castillo said, summing up the performance. “Just straight up. They ran all over us, we didn’t run the ball, they executed plays, we didn’t execute plays. That’s about it.”

With Bowden behind center, Missouri knew what Kentucky wanted to do offensively. The do-everything athlete, who took over at quarterback after injuries to returning starter Terry Wilson and Sawyer Smith, completed just two of 15 passes last week against Georgia. Entering Saturday, he had completed 12 of 30 attempts on the season for 130 yards but rushed for 394 yards and two scores.

Stopping Bowden proved to be another matter. Bowden carried the ball 21 times for 204 yards and two touchdowns. As a team, Kentucky racked up 297 yards on the ground.

Odom said Missouri entered the game with its defense “almost scripted,” yet the Tigers still struggled to contain Bowden. He broke off seven runs for 10 yards or more, including the back-breaking 33-yard score.

“I’ve said all week, if anybody would listen to me, he’s a good player, he’s going to make some plays,” Odom said. “We needed to limit those, and we didn’t.”

Between Bowden and Smith, who saw a few snaps, Kentucky only attempted eight passes and completed just four, yet Bowden’s arm also hurt the Tigers. He set up the Wildcats’ first touchdown of the day with a 44-yard completion to Bryce Oliver.

Missouri has struggled against mobile quarterbacks this season. The Tigers have now allowed more than 200 rushing yards three times on the year, and in all three games the signal caller has had at least 120 of those yards. While a running quarterback does can provide an element of misdirection to an opponent’s running game and provide an extra blocker, sophomore linebacker Nick Bolton and junior safety Josh Bledsoe both said the issue boils down to the basics: tackling and filling gaps.

“It was basically just everybody has to read their assignments, stay in their gaps, and like I said, we just got to play better,” said Bledsoe. “It’s unacceptable.”

The final nail in Missouri’s proverbial coffin came in the opening seconds of the fourth quarter. The Tiger defense had just held Kentucky to its third drive in a row without a first down — or at least it appeared that way. But on fourth down and six from the Kentucky 22, the Wildcats dialed up a fake punt for junior Max Duffy. Duffy took off down the right sideline and found no Tigers in his way, scampering for 26 yards and a first down. The Wildcats went on to hold the ball for more than three minutes and score another touchdown.

Duffy exploited a unique punt return formation on the play. In an effort to keep the rugby-style punter from rolling another ball deep down the field — Duffy had flipped the field with a 71-yard yard punt in his last appearance — Missouri lined up with two returners deep, Richaud Floyd and Adam Sparks. Doing so took a player away from the right side of the line of scrimmage.

“Great play by them, bad design by us,” Odom said “… (Duffy) sits there and waits, and if you’ve got a return on, if you don’t have enough guys there to stop it, he’s going to take off. It’s not the first time that he’s done it. So that is frustrating.”

During his Tuesday media conference, Odom said he wanted to find more opportunities to get Okwuegbunam the ball between the 20-yard lines. The NFL Draft hopeful had caught just 18 passes on the season entering Saturday, but six of those had gone for touchdowns.

Whether it was due to Kentucky’s defense, Okwuegbunam’s inability to get separation, Bryant’s struggles, or a combination of the three, Missouri certainly did not succeed in that goal. Okwuegbunam received just one target, which he bobbled and then dropped. The game marked his first without a catch in 20 games and nearly two years, since Missouri played Tennessee on Nov. 11, 2017.

“I wasn’t perfect today,” Okwuegbunam said. “There were some times where I didn’t win my matchup, and there were some other times that we couldn’t get the ball off, whether it was pressure or something like that.”

Missouri has an open week this Saturday, its second of the season, before traveling to Athens for its third road game in a row to face No. 10 Georgia on Nov. 9.