Mizzou missed a golden opportunity to topple UGA
The Georgia Bulldogs came to Faurot Field as either the second or third best team in college football, depending on which poll you believe. They’re a very, very good team. They’re better than Missouri on most days. But the Tigers did absolutely nothing to make Georgia prove it in a 43-29 loss on Saturday.
“We know the self inflicted things we did to allow that game to go the way that it did,” head coach Barry Odom said. “We have a chance to be a really good football team, but we’ve got to be right.
The word choice is important here. Odom said Missouri "allowed" the game to turn into a Georgia win. And that’s what it felt like. Georgia didn’t come in and beat Missouri. The Bulldogs didn’t play all that well. They gave the Tigers every opportunity to win. And Mizzou couldn’t do it.
The Tigers turned the ball over three times, had a punt blocked, missed a field goal, committed four penalties and dropped numerous passes. And that was just the first half.
“We don’t prepare to lose,” linebacker Terez Hall said. “Stuff like that can’t happen. We’re better than what we played.”
On the biggest stage and in front of the biggest crowd it will have in Columbia all season, Mizzou so thoroughly beat itself than all Georgia had to do was stand innocently by and let the Tigers determine the outcome.
“It was definitely a missed opportunity,” running back Damarea Crockett said. “I feel like we’ve just got to learn from it and we’ve got to execute better if we want to be a great football team, a special football team. There’s a fine line between good and great.”
For a brief moment in the third quarter, it appeared that Missouri might be able to make a game out of the affair. The Tigers went on an 11-play, 75-yard drive to draw within 27-14 with 7:50 left in the third. On Georgia’s very next possession, Jeremiah Holloman jumped over DeMarkus Acy to make an acrobatic catch and danced along the sideline for a 61-yard touchdown…or so it appeared and was called on the field.
The officials reviewed the play because it appeared Holloman had dropped the ball before crossing the goal line. But there was no camera angle that provided conclusive evidence and the call on the field stood. It was 33-14 Bulldogs and at that point, even those that had stuck around into the second half were hit with the reality that this wasn’t going to be Missouri’s day.
Combine that call with the lack of a whistle that almost certainly should have blown to stop Albert Okwuegbunam’s forward progress on a first quarter fumble that was returned 68 yards for a touchdown by Tyson Campbell (Okwuegbunam said after the game he takes responsibility for the fumble and he needs to secure the ball better) and a 41-yard field goal by Tucker McCann that was called no good despite it appearing that he may have made it and it’s not difficult to make an argument that officials’ calls cost Missouri 17 points.
And on McCann’s field goal: “Everybody thought it was good and the official said it wasn’t so it must not have been.”
It’s also not that difficult an argument to make that those 17 points wouldn’t have changed the outcome on a day Missouri took the blueprint for upsetting a top five team and set it on fire before burying it in a pile of ridiculous mistakes.
And while the defense did an admirable job keeping Mizzou afloat during that disastrous first half, the dam broke in the second. Georgia scored touchdowns on three of its first four drives after the break to keep Mizzou at arm’s length as the Tiger offense began to actually do more damage to the Georgia defense than to itself.
“I thought in the first half we played as good of defense as we have played,” Odom said.
There is no shame in losing to Georgia. Though they didn’t really look like it on Saturday, the Bulldogs are fully deserving of a top five ranking and now have the SEC East in a stranglehold having already beaten Mizzou and South Carolina. But Saturday felt like a golden opportunity that the Tigers wasted. Teams like Georgia don’t have many days on which they look vulnerable. Saturday was one of them and the Tigers simply weren’t able to accept the Bulldogs’ invitation to beat them.
“It ain’t the fact they’re the number two team. That’s just a number,” Hall said. “We beat ourselves. It’s all self inflicted. I don’t know man. It is what it is. It ain’t because they’re the number two team. They put their clothes on just like us.”
“We’re not into any moral victories,” Odom said. “That doesn’t really sit well with our football team. We can’t let this one define us. We’ve got to move on.”
The game against Georgia was never going to be the pivot point of this season. It has been since the schedule came out the second least likely win on the Tigers’ schedule. Mizzou entered its most difficult quarter of the season at 3-and-0 with some room for error. The Tigers get a bye week before back-to-back road trips to South Carolina and Alabama. In looking at the schedule for months now, 1-and-2 in this second set of three games should always have been the benchmark. If the Tigers can do that, they set themselves up to make a run at a nine or ten-win season as the schedule opens up a bit in the final six games.
“We’ve fought back from worse. 1-5 is a lot worse than 3-1 right now," quarterback Drew Lock said. "If we play our A game, there’s no doubt in my mind that we can compete with anyone in the country. That’s something I believe in my soul, and that’s why this loss, I mean, our first loss this year hurts way worse than any loss last year, regardless of what loss it was last year. This loss just hurts because I just really think we can beat anybody we want to.”
Saturday showed that the Tigers have the ability to do those things and potentially to be the second best team in the SEC East. It also showed that the Tigers aren’t good enough to win a lot of those games if they’re playing at a level so far from their best.
“We’ve taken a lot of steps. We’ve got to take the next step,” Odom said. “We don’t want to be here many times if any more. It rips at your soul.”