The preseason is over and it was a success. Mizzou had one goal in the season’s first two weeks: Don’t trip over your own feet. The Tigers stayed upright during a two-week span where quite a few others lost their balance.
Florida State has played its way out of the College Football Playoff with back to back losses. Notre Dame certainly should have; losing at home to Northern Illinois as a four-touchdown favorite should be automatic disqualification. LSU and Iowa have narrowed their margins for error. Michigan doesn’t look capable.
Missouri, meanwhile, took care of business with ease for a second week in a row. The Tigers beat up on Buffalo 38-0. They’ve outscored their opponents 59-0 in the first half. Yes, the competition has been subpar. That goes without saying. But Northern Illinois is hardly a juggernaut. Bowling Green, which took Penn State to the brink in Happy Valley, wasn’t scaring many Nittany Lions fans before kickoff. Missouri has done what it needed to do.
Now the tests begin. Nine of the final ten games are against Power Five competition, eight of them against the SEC. Boston College comes to town next week at 2-0 after ending the Seminoles’ season and beating up Duquesne 56-0 on Saturday. After that it’s Vanderbilt, also 2-0 after beating Virginia Tech and Alcorn State.
In most ways, Missouri’s first two games of the season were its two easiest. Murray State was a bad FCS team and Buffalo a bad MAC team. The Tigers get just one more break, an October road trip to Massachusetts. But the first two weeks were a test of a different sort. A loss would have virtually disqualified Missouri from playoff consideration. Until they lose, thanks to the new 12-team format, the Tigers may not face a make or break game other than the one against UMASS.
Sure, it’s easy to argue if you lose to BC or Vandy you’re not good enough to make the playoff anyway. And that’s most likely true. But weird things happen in college football and one week hardly ever seems to foretell the next one. A season is 12 individual pop quizzes graded on a pass/fail basis. Missouri has passed the first two. Ten more remain. They can probably afford one failure as long as it doesn’t happen in Amherst and they might get away with two.
The only things we were likely to find out about the Tigers for sure in the first two weeks of the season were likely to be negative. We might find out they weren’t nearly as good as they’d been hyped up to be. We might find out they couldn’t handle the attention. We might find out they weren’t ready for prime time. We don’t know for sure that any of those things aren’t true, but we also didn’t get confirmation of anything negative. The fact that Missouri came out and handled its business should count for something. It does to the head coach.
“That was actually the pregame speech was take advantage of opportunities and don’t disrespect the fans or the game by assuming the other team’s not going to play,” Eli Drinkwitz said. “We’ve got to play as hard as we can and really pleased with those guys.”
“I think it’s easy for certain teams to overlook opponents, waste the opportunity you have to dominate the way we’ve done,” quarterback Brady Cook said.
Missouri couldn’t punch its ticket to the playoff in these two weeks. But it could absolutely play its way out of it. Think of it like you think of the cliche about the Masters. They always say the Masters doesn’t start till the back nine on Sunday. You can’t win it on Thursday, but you sure as hell can lose it. Missouri hasn’t won anything. But it hasn’t lost anything either.
The Tigers know they’re just getting started.
“Everything is just gonna keep on getting tougher and tougher each week as we go,” sophomore safety Marvin Burks Jr. said.
Indeed it is. Missouri’s two easiest games—or at least two of the easiest three—are over. The competition is going to get better. But Missouri thinks it’s got plenty of room to improve as well.
“I'm pleased with where we're at. We're not we're not we're not clicking at 100% just yet,” Drinkwitz said. “So that's good news, man. That's really good news for us. I'd hate for us to be as good as we're going to be all year.”
And that’s really the whole thing. Missouri has done what it should do. If it plays this way in six weeks in Tuscaloosa, will it be good enough? Maybe not. But Missouri doesn’t play Alabama tomorrow. It has six weeks to improve. Last year’s team didn’t really hit its stride until at least week three against Kansas State, and arguably quite a bit later than that. The Tigers won six of their last seven games in 2023 with the lone loss a down to the final few minutes affair at top-ranked Georgia. They weren’t all that good in week two, but by week ten nobody wanted to play them.
So don’t make the assumption this team is a finished product. If it is, Drinkwitz and his staff won’t have done a very good job. Missouri has back-to-back shutouts under a new defensive coordinator. They don’t have a running back who carried the ball last year and have multiple new players on every level of the defense. And, still, they’re 2-0 by a combined score of 89-0.
It can get better. But it’s been pretty good already. Not everybody in the top ten can say that after two weeks.
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