Drew Lock doesn’t want to reflect yet. That’s for next week, he said, after the final regular season game of his Missouri career, when “we’re all sitting around, we all just have lifts, coaches are gone and we’re all just thinking about what bowl game we’re going to play in.” But following the Tigers’ upset of then-No. 11 Florida on Nov. 3, as his teammates celebrated around him in the visiting locker room of Ben Hill Griffin Stadium, Lock sat on a bench at the edge of the locker room and allowed himself a moment to think.
Lock’s mind drifted to the 2015 season, when he was forced into the starting lineup as a true freshman. After winning in his first start, Missouri lost seven of its next eight. He thought about the last time he had played in the Swamp. It was midway through a 4-8 2016 campaign, Lock’s second season and head coach Barry Odom’s first, and Lock completed 4 of 18 passes and threw two interceptions, both of which were returned for touchdowns. He thought back just one week prior, when Missouri appeared to have all but secured its first win over a ranked opponent during Lock’s tenure, then blew an 11-point fourth quarter lead at home to Kentucky, losing on the final snap.
At each of those points, Lock and the rest of the team endured a lot of criticism from the Missouri fan base. Finally, this win served as a tangible step forward for the entire program — not just a win over a ranked team, but an emphatic one the week after a painful loss that had led many to write off the season. Lock and the rest of the team had vowed to bounce back, and he had delivered.
“There’s actually a couple pictures of me just sitting on the bench and just, I don’t know, just being able to think about that environment at that stadium and what that place did to me my sophomore year, and just the growth that this whole offensive unit, defensive unit, whole team has made,” Lock said. “To be able to go into that place a couple years later with, again, a really good team, a highly-ranked opponent, and do what we did, yeah, that was something that I definitely reflected on in that moment.”
Lock and the 18 other seniors who will be honored Friday before Missouri plays Arkansas have been through a lot in their college careers. Most committed to the Tigers in either the 2014 or 2015 recruiting classes; in both cases, the team was coming off an SEC East championship. But a 2015 season that saw starting quarterback Maty Mauk dismissed from the team, a player boycott over racial protests on campus and the retirement of head coach Gary Pinkel swiftly squashed that momentum. Odom’s 5-13 record through his first year-and-a-half further eroded fan support, and even though the team won its final six games of the 2017 regular season, the fact that it didn’t beat an opponent with a winning record kept many skeptical about the program. Brutal losses on the final play to both South Carolina and Kentucky this year further contributed to the reputation that Odom, Lock and the rest of the seniors couldn’t come through against winning competition.
But the Florida win changed all that. Now, if Missouri is able to beat Arkansas and finish the regular season with an 8-4 record, the senior class will be able to feel like it weathered the struggles of its first three seasons and helped the program take a significant step forward.
“You know the record of us not beating ranked teams,” junior guard Tre’Vour Wallace-Simms said. “That was big. That’s something Drew accomplished. That’s one strike that they had against him, and I’m very glad he was able to accomplish that. That win, it really meant a lot to him, and also the seniors. We’re taking this program in the right direction.”
As his college career draws to an end, tackle Paul Adams has found himself having frequent “late night talks” with other members of his class. Multiple times this season, he’s sat down with guys like Lock, tight end Kendall Blanton, guard Kevin Pendleton, safety Dominic Nelson and others and reminisced on everything they’ve experienced in their time at Missouri, good and bad.
The good times, nights spent hanging out, or simply goofy locker room moments, are fun to look back on, but Adams said the adverse moments did more to bring the class closer together. Not everyone stuck it out through the difficult times — 10 of the 22 high school prospects that signed with Missouri in the 2015 class have left the program — but Lock said those who did are closer as a result of the struggles. “That will just be a bond that will never break between all of us,” he said.
The seniors also believe the adversity they faced during their first three years has equipped the them to handle difficult circumstances this season, and they’ve passed that trait on to the rest of the team. Without 2015 and 2016, Adams said, this three-game winning streak following the loss to Kentucky might not have happened.
“There are some games this year that we’ve came out with that I don’t see us winning the past couple years,” Adams said, “and I think that has a lot to do with our senior class and kind of how we’ve approached this season.”
Defensive coordinator Ryan Walters, whose four-year tenure at Missouri has overlapped with that of this year’s senior class, took it a step further, saying the experience will continue to help the players when they leave college.
“I don’t think any program in the country has gone through what those guys have gone through in the course of four years,” Walters said. “And so for them to sort of be able to reap the benefits of sticking it out, and just putting their head down and going to work and trusting the process, those will be lifelong lessons that they can take with him and hopefully instill within their families and within their jobs and whenever they get out of here.”
Friday will, of course, be a special moment for all of the 19 players honored. Adams and Blanton both expressed concern that their mothers might get emotional on the field, and that emotion could spill over to themselves. But more than anyone else, the day will be about Lock, the face of the program through all its struggles and triumphs the last four seasons.
Lock almost didn’t make it to this moment, for multiple reasons. As a four-star recruit, Lock had his choice of playing nearly anywhere in the country, and Michigan coach Jim Harbaugh at least tempted him to spurn his home state school. After Pinkel retired at the end of his difficult freshman year, transferring crossed Lock’s mind. Most notably, following his breakthrough junior season, in which Lock set the SEC single-season record with 44 passing touchdowns, he seriously considered leaving college for the NFL Draft.
Even this senior season has been a bumpy ride. Lock has had to adapt to the more pro-style offensive scheme implemented by Derek Dooley, and it hasn’t always been pretty, especially when top wide receiver Emanuel Hall missed four games and was rendered invisible due to a groin injury in another. In Missouri’s first four conference games of the season, Lock completed fewer than 50 percent of his passes and threw five interceptions versus one touchdown. After the Tiger offense failed to pick up a first down in the second half against Kentucky, the critics claiming he couldn’t get it done against upper-tier competition grew louder than ever.
That’s why Lock allowed himself to take a moment to bask in the Florida win. He could have gone pro. He could have given up on Dooley’s system and simply gone back to racking up statistics in his final few games before the NFL Draft. But Lock continued to have faith in his coaches, his teammates and himself. To finally see Lock’s faith pay off in the form of a signature win, Dooley said, made him “the proudest I’ve ever been as a coach.”
“Here he was, he had his last chance probably to shake off the narrative that everybody tries to put on him, and he probably played his best game ever at Florida,” Dooley said. “… It’s just a real testament to his character and his grit. He’s shown it this year.”
Lock wants to save the reminiscing for next week, but he admitted that Friday, once again, he might not be able to help it. “It will probably hit me almost the end of the fourth (quarter),” he said, “depending on what the situation is like in the game. If it’s I gotta go on my last drive ever as a Tiger to go win the game, or we gotta go ice the game, or just any situation, I think it will all hit me right then.”
Thanks to the last three weeks, when Lock does look back on his college career Friday, he will almost certainly be able to say he and his fellow seniors left Missouri in a better position than they found it.
