Redemption times two for Mizzou
Brady Cook called it revenge. Eli Drinkwitz called it redemption. Johnny Walker called it “the best experience I had my whole life playing football.”
The Missouri Tigers’ 30-27 win over Kansas State was all of those things. It was the biggest win Drinkwitz has had in four years as the head coach of the Tigers. It was a great day for a program that hasn’t had enough great days.
A win by any margin over the Wildcats would have been phenomenal for a program and a fanbase that has had far too few moments like this one over the last eight-plus years. But how it happened? The players that caused it to happen? That’s what made Saturday special.
Cook was booed during pre-game introductions on the video screen. It wasn’t everybody. It wasn’t incredibly loud. But it happened. The redshirt junior was starting his 16th game for the Tigers. Most of them were played with a torn labrum in his throwing shoulder. Pretty much all of them were played with the fans whispering, then grumbling, then screaming for someone else to play quarterback. Who didn’t really matter, just as long as it was someone different.
“I’m gonna say it,” Drinkwitz said, which is always his tell that he’s about to say something he’s not sure he should say. “It pissed me off when we booed our starting quarterback to start the game. That pissed me off.
"He went out there and played his butt off for this University and this team. They need to get behind him. We need to get behind the young man. You want to boo me, fine. You don’t boo the starting quarterback. It’s bullcrap. I’ll say it again. It should never happen.
“That really bothered me and I’m sure glad he played so well. He played so well.”
He did. A career-high 356 yards and two touchdowns. Nine completions of 15 yards or more. A rushing touchdown. Nothing close to a turnover. A game-winning drive in the final 85 seconds despite just one timeout and a self-inflicted, self-described “boneheaded” play by his head coach tacking five penalty yards on to Harrison Mevis’ SEC record 61-yard game-winning field goal. Drinkwitz wasn’t done. A follow-up question asked if he had ever seen Cook throw the ball this well.
“In practice all the time,” he said forcefully. “In practice. That’s why he’s the starting quarterback. Why are we still asking questions to defend Brady Cook right now? The dude’s a good football player. He’s a really good football player. Quit asking me about him.”
Drinkwitz had the pulpit and he was going to use it to defend the leader of his football team. Cook has taken plenty of bullets. And some of them, if we’re being honest, have been deserved. He hasn’t been great. Sometimes he hasn’t even be good. But he has always shown up. He has answered every question and owned every mistake. And on Saturday, when his team and his coach needed a win like they’ve never needed one before in his four years on campus, Cook showed up and delivered. He drove the Tigers from their own 18 to the Kansas State 39 to set up the game-winning kick.
Most of us would perhaps have taken that opportunity to fire back at our skeptics. Because God knows Cook has had skeptics, including, at times, the guy writing these words. This is about as close as Cook will ever come to firing back:
“I hear it. It’s hard,” he said. “This is my dream school. All I want to do is play quarterback here. I’d like if everyone else wanted me to play quarterback here too. That would be a nice feeling. Games like this probably could help. We’ll see.”
If Cook’s confidence wavered, he never showed it publicly. If he wanted to fire some arrows, he never did. He just kept beating out every player his coach brought in to take his job. And somewhere along the way, he earned the respect of the only people that really matter: his coaches and teammates.
“He’s a dog,” wide receiver Mookie Cooper said. “We knew he was going to push through. We already knew he was just gonna try to battle. That’s just 12.”
“Brady Cook, man,” Luther Burden III said after his second straight 100-yard game. “I been knowing he had it in him since I’ve been here. I’ve been seeing the dog in him. He’s never gonna give up. He’s gonna give it all he got no matter what. Shoot, let him cook.”
He’s never cooked like this. It was the best game of his college career, and maybe his entire football career. And Missouri needed every last bit of it. Even with Cook’s heroics, he had to hand the baton to another Tiger looking for redemption to seal the win.
Mevis, dubbed “The Thiccer Kicker” for his unusual positional physique, was a cult hero his first two years on campus. He scored 189 points and missed only five total kicks—none under 40 yards—in his first two years on campus. But his junior year featured six misses, including a chip shot 20-yarder that would have won a game at Auburn that Missouri eventually lost in overtime. The build that had been a fun thing was suddenly the weapon used to ridicule him. The same people who had lauded him in his first two years were now calling him out of shape and just plain fat. Then he missed two field goals in the season opener against South Dakota. Missouri changed the snapper and he missed an extra point for the first time in 100 college tries against Middle Tennessee State. And suddenly nobody knew if Missouri could count on its outsized kicker if it had to.
On Saturday, it had to. The choices were these: a 61-yard field goal or a Hail Mary. That was it. Drinkwitz decided to go with the leg over the arm.
“We had told ourselves if we got to the 40 that we felt like Harrison could make it,” Drinkwitz said. “We got ourselves to the 38 so then we took the penalty to make it more dramatic. This is all for TV anyway. It was in the script.”
Perhaps. But man this script didn’t seem likely. Nobody in the history of the Southeastern Conference has—make that, had—ever made a 61-yard field goal. Only Tom Whelihan, owner of a 62-yard boot, had ever made one as long in 134 seasons of Mizzou football. Mevis had done it, but not in a game.
“Only in practice,” he said.
But the Tigers sent Mevis out there and he booted it through.
His teammates said they didn’t have much doubt. Cooper said he assured teammates Burden and Theo Wease Jr. that Mevis would make it. Why? Johnny Walker Jr. figured it was in his range because “I think Mevis has the strongest leg in the world. I think he can make anything from anywhere.”
He knew he hit it well. He knew it was on line. Four arms went up. Missouri 30, Kansas State 27.
“I kind of know before anyone else just because of the way it comes off my foot,” Mevis said. “It felt good.”
“I told him right before the kick, ‘listen, you’ve been doing this your whole life,’” Cook said. “This is the Mevis opportunity right here.
“I could not believe it. Unbelievable.”
The same could be said for Cook. Three hours before, he had been booed by some of his fellow students. Eighty-five seconds before he shouldered the hopes of a fanbase and a few years worth of outside doubt. Cook led the drive. Mevis made the kick. As the fans poured on to the field, incurring Mizzou a fine Desiree Reed-Francois said she would pay “gladly,” what did the two Tigers most responsible for the mayhem think?
“That was truly a dream come true,” Cook said.
“I just took off running the other way, celebrated with my team. They all tackled me and that hurt. But I’ll take one for the team. It was such a good experience. These guys deserve it. This team deserves it.
“It’s really about them. It’s not about me.”
But it is. It’s about Mevis. And about Cook. And about Drinkwitz. And about a program that has spent the last eight years taking one step forward followed by two steps back and sometimes just flat out tripping over their own feet. But on this day, mostly thanks to the arm of Cook and the leg of Mevis, the Tigers flew forward. Is it program-changing? Who knows? That will be determined over the next nine games. Perhaps in December this is the day on which we’ll look back and say that’s when the special season started. Maybe not. There’s so much of the script still to be written. But Saturday was one hell of a chapter.
“Sometimes it’s not always as fast as everybody wants it to be or I want it to be, but I think this is a step in the right direction and affirms what we believe in,” Drinkwitz said. “Redemption’s a beautiful thing.”
PowerMizzou.com is a proud game day partner of Yuengling Traditional Lager the taste of game-time @yuenglingbeer #LagerUp
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