As he walked off Faurot Field for the final time, his team leading 35-0 and victory well in hand, Drew Lock hugged his linemen, slapped hands with his receivers and applauded the die-hards who had braved three-plus hours of rain to see his final performance at home as Missouri's quarterback.
“I had an individual message for all of them,” Lock said. “They mean a whole lot to me because, you know, in the end the quarterback gets all the blame for the wins and the losses. Being 8-and-4, you get a little more praise and those guys should have definitely gotten a lot more praise than I did. They’re the heart and soul of this team. They’re the backbone of this team. Without those guys, there’s no I am who I am.”
“I love that dude,” senior offensive lineman Kevin Pendleton said. “We’ve been through a lot of stuff together. That’s my guy. Someone I’ll be able to talk to for years and years and years down the road. That was a special moment for him. I’m glad he got to have that moment.”
Lock’s final game at Faurot Field was in many ways the most anti-Drew Lock game in the last four years. And the 38-0 win was the perfect way for the senior quarterback to bid farewell to his home career.
For three seasons, Lock was the prototypical stat compiler. He piled up ridiculous numbers, largely against overmatched opponents, but his teams won just 13 games and lost 20. On Friday, he rode his defense and his running game to a blowout victory while picking his spots to make game-changing plays.
It's really what Lock has done all year. As a senior, the four-star generational quarterback blessed with the rocket right arm turned into an ultra-talented game manager. Yes, he put up some numbers. But they weren’t the video game numbers he posted under Josh Heupel’s run and gun and pray for your defense system. Lock threw for 840 fewer yards and 19 fewer touchdowns than a season ago but he is almost unquestionably a better quarterback than he was a season ago when the NFL recommended he return to school for his senior season. His interceptions dropped from 13 to eight. He completed ten more passes on 20 fewer attempts. Missouri averaged just 0.6 points fewer per game than a season ago and went from 129th to 40th in time of possession. In the Tigers' final four games, Lock averaged fewer than 250 yards passing, but accounted for 12 touchdowns and just two turnovers.
“The offensive coordinator hire, a lot of heads scratched about it,” head coach Barry Odom said. “I wanted us to play smarter team football. And that didn’t mean points and yards. That meant wins.
“Drew became a better football player. It’s not always throwing the go ball for 50 yards.”
“Everybody knows how talented Drew is no matter what his stats are,” linebacker Cale Garrett said. “I know who my quarterback is and I know he’s a special player and so does everybody else on this team.”
Lock played his final game in front of a marginal crowd kept away by consistent rain throughout the afternoon. But among those watching were Denver Broncos general manager John Elway and senior personnel advisor Gary Kubiak. The Broncos are one of a handful of teams who should have first half of the first round draft picks and who may be looking for a quarterback.
“He’s a really, really good quarterback all around,” senior wide receiver Emanuel Hall said. “He’s a complete quarterback. He’s going to play in the league until he’s done playing.”
Lock’s season—and Derek Dooley’s hire as offensive coordinator—were designed not only to lead Mizzou to more wins than it had gotten in the past, but also to show that he was a quarterback capable of doing much more than winding up and throwing the ball 65 yards downfield to receivers running past overmatched defensive backs. He did that, never more so than in Friday’s win over the disinterested Razorbacks.
The Tigers ran the ball 38 times and threw it just 25 while Lock was in the game. Many of the passes were short and intermediate throws. Lock ran for two touchdowns. It was the first time he’d had more than one rushing touchdown in the game and brought his season total to six, twice the number he had in his first three years.
Lock spent most of the second half running the play clock under ten seconds and just trying to get the game over with. In other words, he simply did enough to lead his team to victory.
“He’s not a number-chasing dude,” Pendleton said. “He’s never let the numbers, the success, the failures, change him. He’s embraced every day that he’s had here.”
“It just felt right walking off the field,” Lock said. “There’s no way we were gonna be able to leave this game without a win. It was one of those situations, we were just going to will it to happen.”
Lock has one game left in his career (he was asked about the bowl game and said he will play). But the final game of the regular season is the time for writing immediate epitaphs and assessing legacies. Lock’s is complicated. Was he a quarterback who fell short of sky-high expectations or is he a player who was every bit as good as advertised and just didn’t have enough around him until his final season?
“He’ll go down as one of the best in our conference,” Odom said. “Really after the Kentucky game, there was a point in time where he said really anything less than 8-4 is not right. He took that ownership and, along with a bunch of guys around him, he’s playing his best right now, he’s making great decisions and he’s done a great job of leading our team.
"He left his mark."
Ultimately, the judgement on that will come after we see what Missouri does the next few seasons. If Missouri goes to greater heights, Lock will be the local boy who stayed home and led the Tigers out of the wilderness through a coaching change and campus chaos. If he goes on to a lucrative NFL career, Tiger fans will say they saw him before he was a star.
Legacy and history, that’s all for the future. On this Friday afternoon, Lock closed out a career that was at times exhilarating, at others wildly frustrating, and almost certainly impossible to sum up before it is even officially over.
“Drew’s a team guy, man,” fellow senior Terez Hall said. “That’s why he stayed another year for us. It ain’t about the stats, man. If you’re playing for stats, you’re a bad teammate.
“It’s cool, you can throw for 15,000 career passing yards and we ain’t winning nothing but three games a year, you gonna get a lot of hype from the media for that, but you ain’t gonna gain nothing out of that. You a 15,000 yard passer, but you still a loser. You ain’t a team player."
As he walked to the sideline with 8:57 still to play, Drew Lock had finally and emphatically answered the biggest question Missouri fans had about him for four years. He deserved the highest compliment that can be paid a quarterback. The leader of just the 17th eight-win season in Missouri football history, Lock left Faurot as a winner.
