Missouri gives another one away
COLUMBIA, SC—When I was a kid, my dad was the head coach for my sister’s little league softball team. I helped him coach most games. Prior to each game, we would talk about just needing to avoid “the inning from hell.”
This was the inning where a team that otherwise looked relatively competent and sometimes even bordered on good suddenly lost its mind and turned every single play into a disaster.
Missouri’s inning from hell spanned approximately nine minutes in the third quarter of a 37-35 loss against South Carolina. And the question now is whether it has derailed the season.
“We’ll go watch this game and it will be a gut-wrencher watching it,” Drew Lock said after his second consecutive game without a touchdown pass. “I have probably four, five, six, seven plays in my mind that I want back. But that’s football.”
Damarea Crockett sped down the right sideline at Williams-Brice Stadium and outran two South Carolina defenders into the end zone. The 70-yard gallop gave the Tigers a 30-21 lead and momentarily restored some order after the Tigers squandered numerous first half chances to expand what was a 23-14 halftime lead.
But the play was reviewed by the officials. One of them somewhere apparently saw an angle that definitively proved Crockett stepped out of bounds just outside the Gamecocks’ 10 yard line. Rather than a 70-yard touchdown it was a 59-yard run that gave Mizzou first and ten from the ten-and-a-half. Here’s what happened next:
*False start on Albert Okwuegbunam
*Crockett run for no gain
*Crockett unsportsmanlike conduct penalty
*Lock incomplete pass
*Crockett run for one yard
*Corey Fatony fumbled punt snap
Missouri went from first-and-10 just outside the ten to punting from the 34 to giving South Carolina a first down at its own 47.
The Tigers surrendered a field goal—and the lead—on South Carolina’s next drive. They followed it with a pick six from Lock that was thrown directly to South Carolina linebacker Sherrod Greene. When Mizzou got the ball back, it drove 51 yards in seven plays only to see Tucker McCann miss a 25-yard field goal.
All told, the Tigers were outscored 17-0 in the quarter, turning a 23-14 lead into a 31-23 deficit. They would come back to actually take the lead once the fourth quarter began and they felt free to start playing something resembling football again.
“Damarea was so close,” Odom said. “But that’s the way it goes. You’ve got to find a way to overcome it. We didn’t do that today.”
“I just feel like things kind of built on each other and we lost focus there for a quick second,” Crockett said.
It was stunningly similar to what happened against the Gamecocks a year ago. In that game, Missouri led 10-0 before allowing a kickoff return for a touchdown, throwing an interception and allowing a 25-yard touchdown run. The three-play stretch spurred South Carolina to a 31-13 lead and Missouri didn’t recover for a month.
This time, the Tigers showed signs of life, taking the lead on two separate occasions in the fourth quarter. The last came on a 57-yard McCann field goal with just 78 seconds to go. But the Missouri defense saved one last major breakdown for the Gamecocks’ final drive, leaving Kyle Markway completely uncovered for a 27-yard gain that would eventually lead to Parker White’s game-winning 33-yard field goal.
“That can’t really happen,” Odom said. “But it did.”
Afterward, Missouri’s players were repeatedly asked if they were confident the team could bounce back from such a devastating defeat.
“I don’t for one second think that we’re going to sit back and say ‘Woe is me’ and wave the white flag,” Odom said. “That’s not where we’re at. “Frustrated? You bet. Disappointed. But also you use it as motivation.”
“I’m really confident,” Lock said. “We’ve done it before. We’ve done it a thousand times. It just sucks.”
“I just told them we’ve got to let it hurt tonight,” Crockett said. “Tomorrow, we’ve got to wake up fresh and forget about it and act like it never happened. Not like it never happened, but just never look back.”
They said all the right things. But they said them last year too and they lost five of their first six games and never beat a team that went to a bowl game. Up next is a trip to Alabama, where college football dreams go to die. And the second half of the schedule holds dates with Kentucky and at Florida that look tougher than they used to be.
But here’s the bigger thing: Good teams don’t do what Missouri has been doing this season. The Tigers have played three games against legitimate competition and haven’t come close to putting together a complete effort.
Against Purdue, the defense was a no-show. Against Georgia, the Tigers played a good half on that side of the ball, but the offense was inconsistent and they buried themselves under a mountain of mistakes and the defense collapsed in the final two quarters. If possible, the Tigers actually made more miscues against South Carolina than two weeks ago against the Bulldogs and spread them out evenly across all three phases of the game.
“We literally gave them the game today,” Larry Rountree III said.
Five weeks into year three, Missouri is still making special teams errors, committing back-breaking penalties and turning the ball over when it can absolutely least afford to. It still has not beaten a team you are confident will finish the season with a winning record since the 2016 regular season finale. It is still finding new ways to lose tight football games.
The fact that we’ve gotten this far and haven’t even mentioned that Missouri kicked an onside kick when the coaches did not want an onside kick shows just how full of mind-boggling mistakes Saturday’s loss was.
Miscommunication and focus were two of the most common buzzwords in the post-game interviews. Maybe you can get away with that if you have the talent of Alabama or Georgia. Not if you’re Missouri. This team’s margin of error is too thin and it’s spent the last two games making so many errors even some elite teams wouldn’t overcome them.
This is not a great South Carolina team that beat Missouri. It may not even be a good South Carolina team.
“We felt like we should beat this team,” Terez Hall said. “Just keeping it real with you, man. I felt like we should have handled this team.
“We can’t lose no more.”
But that’s the problem. Missouri keeps telling everyone how they can be good, how they should have won, how they know what’s wrong. And we keep seeing it not get fixed.
The Tigers will play this week with house money. Losing ugly to Alabama is happening to everyone so this game will mean little in the final evaluation. But after that? Missouri can’t have many (any?) missteps. This is a team that has the ability to be decent. Odom keeps saying he thinks it can be pretty good.
“Believe me, we’re not walking around singing and dancing like everything is all right,” he said. “We’ve got a lot of ball to play. I think we can be a lot better football team and I look forward to doing it with this group.”
This group includes a quarterback who was touted for the Heisman Trophy before the season. A defensive lineman who shows first round NFL Draft potential at times. A three-headed attack at running back that accounted for 318 yards from scrimmage on 42 touches (it probably should have been more, but that’s a whole other discussion). A kicker that just made a 57-yarder with the game and potentially the season on the line.
I’ve watched Missouri teams that simply weren’t good enough to win games. But this isn’t that team. Saturday afternoon was nowhere close to the best this Missouri team can be. Neither was two Saturdays ago, or the Saturday before that.
“From now on, this is a promise, we’re going to play as hard as we possibly can,” Hall said. “Teams that come play us are gonna have to play.”
The problem is, we keep talking about the potential and seeing a product that doesn’t live up to it. Couldas and shouldas and almosts are the things losing teams talk about. Good teams overcome bad calls and bad performances and off days and win games. Good teams beat all the bad teams and, believe it or not, even some of the other good teams. When is Missouri going to do that? It needs to start soon.