ATLANTA, GA--Wednesday was never going to be Missouri's day. The Tigers were the final team to take the stage in the main media room at the College Football Hall of Fame on Wednesday, wrapping up the third day at Southeastern Conference Media Days.
Just prior to Barry Odom taking to the podium, some guy named Nick Saban had finished his address.
“When I saw the list earlier in the spring and saw I was speaking on the same day as Coach Saban, I was a little worried I was going to have to go after him,” Mississippi State head coach Joe Moorhead said. “It would be like taking the stage and performing after the Beatles and no one is going to be in their seats and paying attention to what you're doing.”
Quite a few reporters were still in the seats they'd staked out seven hours before when Odom spoke. But most of them had their earbuds in and were furiously banging out their stories on what Saban thought about the College Football Playoff (he says it's not up to him), the quarterback competition (don't ask) and UCF (congrats on a great season, not his problem). The general vibe was that Odom did well and Drew Lock was a star on this day. But largely, Missouri slipped in and out of Atlanta mostly unnoticed in the wake of the Crimson Tide. And they're just fine with that.
"I love it that way. That’s kind of how I’ve been my whole life," senior quarterback Drew Lock said. "We won a good amount of games last year, looking to win more, we’re just kind of hanging out. No one really seems to talk about us, but that’s the Missouri thing I guess. I don’t know."
Odom was just fine with the lack of buzz as well.
"I’m pretty comfortable with where we are," he said. "I know what we’ve got.
"Maybe need to keep it quiet and then go work and after we do something then we can start talking about it a little bit, but I like our approach right now. The excitement that is within our building is as great as I’ve been around since I’ve been at Missouri."
This is Missouri's seventh appearance at SEC Media Days. If you listen closely, you'll still hear some grumbling from the good old boys that have covered the conference for a while that these Tigers don't really belong in the league. They'll rarely if ever lead the conference in headlines generated. They're not in the cellar, but they're not expected to be at the top either. They're just kind of...here.
"Whenever we play well it’s because the other team didn’t play well. It’s not because the Missouri Tigers are a good football team," Lock said. "Whenever someone’s throwing a touchdown or catching a pass, it’s because they were wide open. It wasn’t because we made a great play on the ball or it was a good throw. When Damarea (Crockett) busts a 30-yard run or Larry (Rountree) busts a 50-yard run, it’s not because they’re good backs. It’s because the gaps fit wrong and the O-Line got lucky. I think that’s the chip we have on our shoulder. People talk about our comeback and how the teams that we played weren’t as good as some of the other SEC teams. Well, they had better records than us. They were technically, in the media’s eyes and in football’s eyes, in rankings’ eyes, they were better football teams than us and we beat them, so…"
This might work in the Tigers' favor. Every team plays the disrespect card, but Mizzou seems to believe it. And it doesn't matter if it's true. It only matters if they think it's true. Lock was on a Tour de Force to embrace the doubters on Wednesday. Odom has made a lifetime out of doing things he was told he couldn't do. So maybe this pair is well-equipped to lead the Tigers into this season.
And maybe Missouri is better without expectations. Somehow, the Tigers have always seemed to thrive most when few expect them to. They were picked to win the Big 12 North in 2007, but no one forecast 12 wins and a legitimate shot at the national championship game. In 2013, more people thought Gary Pinkel would lose his job than win the SEC East. So maybe 2018 is the year Missouri makes another move when nobody's looking.
For Odom, it needs to be. He doesn't need to win a division title, but he needs to turn some heads. He needs to inspire confidence that he is the man to lead the program forward. He needs to offer concrete evidence that progress has occurred since the disaster that was 2015. The three seniors he brought with him to SEC Media Days feel the urgency too.
"We’re trying to set the tradition right now," linebacker Terez Hall said. "It’s a process. When I got here, it was 5-7, 5-7, 7-6, whatever it is. We’re just trying to set this winning tradition and we’re going to do that.
"No offense, but we got guys off the team that wasn’t being a part of it. You know what I mean? And if you ain’t a part of it, you better get with the program. The guys who come in as freshmen, they got to know, this is how I got to be. You can’t do this, you can’t do that. It ain’t all fun and games. We came here for winning."
A big factor in this might be Odom's learning curve as an SEC head coach. He had never been a head coach above the high school level when he got the job. And, as he learned, you can't really know what that job entails until you have that job.
"You look at it and you can have a plan ready to go, but then that change is you better have plan B and plan C ready to go," Odom said. "The unknown, the things that happen on a day-to-day operations when you have got 117 kids, there's going to be things that happen that you don't foresee.
"I don't have it all figured out. I'm at a lot more ease at this point in what my role needs to be, how I can best serve my student-athletes, and what our football program needs on a day-to-day operations for us to be our best."
Did he figure it out soon enough? Will he prove it this year? How much winning can Mizzou do? Who knows? But talking season ended Wednesday. The answers lie ahead.
