The players said they knew.
“I didn't really find out nothing,” Luther Burden III said. “Everybody else really found out. I knew we gonna keep swinging no matter what.”
“We already knew about each other, like, just going through the summer, through the fall with these guys, spring,” Nate Noel said. “I just seen the different dog and everybody like, we got that dog in us as a team.”
It sounds good. Maybe Missouri’s players believed they knew how to respond to a punch. Maybe they were fully confident, down 14-3 to Boston College in the second quarter, that 24 unanswered points and a sufficient answer were on the way. But they didn’t know. Nobody knew. There’s no way to know.
“No idea,” head coach Eli Drinkwitz said. “You have no idea.”
You can prepare your team for adversity. You can put them through every drill imaginable in practice. You can tell them there’s a time they’re going to need to answer the bell. You can even think it will happen. But you don’t know. You can’t simulate what happened to Missouri on Saturday in practice. Being down 14-3 on a Tuesday afternoon in August isn’t the same as being down 14-3 on a Saturday afternoon in September.
But that’s where Missouri found itself. The Tigers sleepwalked through a quarter and a half against Boston College. Whether Mizzou didn’t believe the Eagles were good enough to win, whether it thought it was too good to lose or whether it just had a combination of bad plays and bad luck, who knows? But the No. 6 team in the country was trailing 14-3 in a game that might not end all of its dreams, but would certainly put a serious dent in them. And then Missouri answered.
“Really proud of the way they responded,” Drinkwitz said. “I think you saw the team that's committed to each other, a team that responds, a team that's never out of the fight.”
“Just don’t flinch,” safety Tre’Vez Johnson said. “We knew it was going to be a fight.”
The fight doesn’t really start until the favorite gets punched. Missouri got punched. Boston College took the opening kickoff and scored a touchdown at the end of a seven-minute, 29 second drive. Then it held Mizzou to a field goal. Later, it got the ball back and scored again on a 67-yard pass after quarterback Thomas Castellanos dropped the snap and Missouri’s safeties both lost their minds and abandoned their coverage responsibilities to charge toward the ball on the turn some 20 yards away. The question wasn’t whether Castellanos would throw a touchdown pass; it was which receiver he would choose to throw it to.
Just like that it was 14-3. Missouri looked awful, the underdog had some confidence and any thought of the College Football Playoff was on the back burner. At that point, it was simply about finding a way to survive.
These Tigers hadn’t taken a punch in the first two weeks. They hadn’t allowed a point. They’d led for 113-and-a-half of a possible 120 minutes. Murray State and Buffalo hadn’t even reached the red zone. Missouri’s defense had scored more points than the opposing offenses. There wasn’t a single second Mizzou had thought it could possibly lose a game and not a single stressful snap of football through two weeks. Saturday brought some stress. And Missouri answered.
“For us to have to face an adversity and then figure out who we are, who we can count on, what are you going to do with your backs against the wall and you're tired?” Drinkwitz said. “I think was really important. And then, you know, guys who fell short of the sander today, they gotta look themselves in the eye, look themselves in the mirror and say, I'm gonna pick myself up and figure out how to improve and not let this happen again.”
Don’t kid yourself. It wasn’t perfect. Missouri had multiple chances to end this game well before it did. It shouldn’t have come down to two third down conversions in the final four minutes. A team that outgains its opponent by 145 yards and wins the turnover battle and has a better third down conversion rate shouldn’t be in a one-score game in the final minutes. Of course, eight penalties for 78 yards (the bulk of which came on one drive resulting in a second and 58) will do that. So will giving up two huge passing touchdowns due to brain lock in the secondary.
There are things to fix, no question. But the biggest question I had about this Missouri team coming into Saturday was how would it respond when it eventually got pushed? We found out. It pushed back. That’s important. At some point, it's going to happen again. Missouri may need a stronger answer in the future. But the one it came up with on Saturday was enough to keep the Tigers perfect at the season’s quarter pole.
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