This fall will mark 10 years since Missouri announced a seismic change: The athletics department would leave the Big 12 conference and join the SEC. Missouri’s new home has brought the department increased revenue, which has helped bankroll improvements like the South Endzone football facility and new softball stadium. But for virtually every sport, the move has brought new challenges, as well — better competition and more pressure to spend to keep pace.
Over the next 10 weeks, we will be counting down Missouri’s top 10 athletics moments from its first decade as a member of the SEC (which is actually nine years of competition because it took a year for the change to take effect). Note that wrestling, which has spent the past nine years as a member of the Mid-American Conference and will rejoin the Big 12 next fall, wasn’t considered for inclusion since it didn’t compete in the SEC.
For our next entry, we look back to Nov. 28, 2014, when No. 17 Missouri hosted Arkansas in its final game of the regular season, with an SEC championship game berth on the line.
Previous Entries:
No. 10: Thomas' one-hitter clinches regional title
No. 9: Cunningham’s ‘flu game’ keys historic upset
No. 8: Mizzou opens Martin era with win over Iowa St
No. 7: Schweizer closes career with sixth NCAA title
No. 6: Mizzou women draw record crowd, top Tennessee
No. 5: Mizzou scores first ever hoops win over UK
As Missouri prepared to take the field for its final regular-season game of the 2014 campaign, the Tigers had plenty to get fired up about. The obvious source of motivation: beat Arkansas and Missouri would be SEC East champions for the second year in a row, earning another trip to Atlanta for the league title game.
But that wasn’t the only thing brought up in the locker room prior to kickoff. The game also served as the first matchup between Missouri and Arkansas as conference foes, and thus the inaugural installment of the “Battle Line Rivalry.” Then-junior Duron Singleton admitted it felt a bit weird to call a team he’d never faced before a rival, but the coaching staff stressed the importance of earning bragging rights all week leading up to the matchup. It was also senior day, the final game at Faurot Field for one of the winningest four-year classes in program history. Even though the game was played the day after Thanksgiving with students on break, a sellout crowd of 71,168 fans donned black and packed into the stands.
Oh, and some players had brownies on the line — but we’ll get to that later.
That Missouri found itself in position to defend its SEC East title would have seemed unlikely about six weeks earlier. After winning the Cotton Bowl and finishing the season ranked No. 5 the year prior, the Tigers began 2014 ranked in the Top 25, but before the team reached conference play, it stumbled at home against lowly Indiana. Missouri rebounded with a miraculous fourth-quarter comeback at No. 13 South Carolina, but that started to look like a fluke when the Tigers got bludgeoned 34-0 at home by Georgia the following week.
Missouri’s season turned around when the Tigers traveled to Gainesville and routed Florida 42-13, despite gaining just 119 total yards. The team then took care of business at home against Vanderbilt and Kentucky, and when Georgia lost to Florida on Nov. 1, Missouri suddenly once again controlled its own destiny in the race for the SEC East.
Wins over Texas A&M and Tennessee set the stage for Missouri’s matchup with its new rival. Arkansas entered the game hot, particularly on the defensive side of the ball. In the two weeks prior, the Razorbacks had beaten LSU and Ole Miss, both of which were ranked at the time, by a combined score of 47-0. Former Missouri wide receiver Bud Sasser, a senior in 2014, recalled that Arkansas had the rare combination of a disruptive defensive front and a stingy secondary.
“They had a really, really strong defensive line,” Sasser said. “They were causing a lot of havoc up front, which was forcing a lot of interceptions, tipped passes, things like that. But it was also, they weren’t allowing a lot of plays down the field. It just seemed like a lot of the offenses couldn’t really get going, and to be honest, we didn’t start off too hot, either.”
Missouri’s offense had been inconsistent, at best, for most of the 2014 season, and at the outset of the Arkansas game, it struggled. The Tigers got the ball first and promptly punted after going three-and-out. Arkansas responded by marching 70 yards for a touchdown, with its tailback duo of Alex Collins and Jonathan Williams doing most of the damage. Missouri did answer with points as kicker Andrew Baggett drilled a 52-yard field goal, but the Tigers would get just one first down across their next three drives.
Arkansas, meanwhile, scored another touchdown early in the second quarter when quarterback Brandon Allen hit Keon Hatcher for a 12-yard score. Singleton thinks the confluence of motivating factors actually made Missouri’s players a bit too excited entering the game, especially on the defensive side of the ball.
“I think when we first started the game, we were just so excited, so anxious to win that game so we could go back to Atlanta,” he said. “We were just so hyped, so we were just playing and not really focusing on what we needed to do. So I felt like that first quarter and everything like that, we were just so excited, so we had to kind of settle down and get back to just playing ball.”
Missouri had a chance to reclaim momentum late in the second quarter when defensive tackle Josh Augusta stripped Williams and Donavin Newsom fell on the loose ball. The next play, however, quarterback Maty Mauk threw an interception.
At that point, Missouri had done almost nothing to show it could win the game and earn a return trip to Atlanta. But both Sasser and Singleton said the players never panicked, which was a hallmark of that squad.
“We had been down in games before, and we never stressed about it,” Singleton said. “We always just kept fighting. We always preached four quarters, so the game’s not won in the first or the second.”
Missouri got a momentum boost on the final play of the first half, when Baggett hit another long field goal, this one from 50 yards. Sasser called the kicker’s first-half contributions “huge.” Then, after the break, the Tigers forced a three and out and drove inside the Arkansas 20-yard line for the first time all game. Adversity struck again, however, as the drive stalled and the Razorbacks’ Dan Skipper blocked Baggett’s field goal attempt. At the end of the third quarter, the score remained Arkansas 14, Missouri 6.
The fourth quarter had been kind to Missouri that season. At South Carolina, the Tigers scored just seven points in the first three-and-a-half quarters before finding the end zone twice in the final seven minutes and winning 21-20. The week prior, at Tennessee, Missouri scored touchdowns on consecutive fourth-quarter drives to turn a three-point lead into a comfortable cushion. So, even though Missouri hadn’t found the end zone through three quarters against Arkansas’ stout defense, the team remained confident it could pull out a win.
“No matter what’s going on in the game, if you know how to finish and you know what you’re playing for, you typically can get a group of guys that can finish it out together and know, like, okay, even though we’ve had a slow start, we really have 12 minutes left to figure it out, so let’s get it done,” Sasser said.
It took just one play for Missouri to recapture its fourth-quarter magic. The Tigers faced a third down and seven from their own 19-yard line on the first play of the period. Wide receiver Jimmie Hunt, who had dropped a couple passes earlier in the game, made a juggling catch that went for 44 yards. A few plays later, Mauk found Sasser for 28 yards, then capped the possession with a four-yard touchdown pass to Hunt.
Even though nearly 13 minutes remained on the clock, head coach Gary Pinkel opted to go for two points — and reached into his stash of trick plays to do so. Prior to the snap, Mauk walked from his usual shotgun position to the line of scrimmage and barked out directions to the offensive line. With Mauk standing behind the right guard, center Evan Boehm snapped the ball directly to tailback Marcus Murphy, who started left then pitched the ball backward to Sasser. Sasser — no stranger to making big plays as a passer — rolled right and saw both Mauk and fellow wideout Darius White standing open in the end zone. He opted to hit White. The easy pitch and catch tied the game at 14.
“Honestly, both guys were open, as in Maty and Darius White,” Sasser said. “There’s no need in risking it, throwing it to our quarterback when I can throw it to another receiver. So it just worked, it worked well. Great pitch by Marcus Murphy. Great fake, even, by Maty pre-snap. So it just worked, and it was good.”
After the defense forced a quick punt, Missouri got the ball back at its own 15-yard line with more than 10 minutes remaining. This time, the Tigers turned to the ground game. Missouri threw the ball just one time on the possession and gained all 85 yards on running plays, with Murphy and fellow tailback Russell Hansbrough carrying the load. Murphy ultimately capped the drive with a 12-yard scamper off a read-option handoff. The drive not only gave Missouri its first lead of the game, but erased nearly six minutes off the clock.
While the offensive resurrection came at the best possible time, it was fitting that the Missouri defense got the chance to seal the victory. The unit had carried the Tigers much of the season, and after Arkansas scored the two early touchdowns, it imposed its will on the Razorbacks. Across its final seven drives, Arkansas totaled nine first downs and no points. Allen completed just six of his final 20 pass attempts.
Two of the breakout stars from that season, linebacker Kentrell Brothers and defensive end Markus Golden, combined to deliver the decisive blow. With Arkansas inside the Missouri 40-yard line, Brothers and Golden both hit Collins and jarred the ball free. Golden fell on it, giving Missouri possession with just over two minutes to play.
Even though Missouri’s nation-leading streak of games with at least one takeaway came to an end at 47 earlier that season, generating turnovers remained a key for the Tiger defense. Nearly seven years later, Singleton revealed one of the secret ingredients that gave the unit its knack for taking the ball away: brownies. Any player who forced a turnover would get brownies baked by the wife of defensive coordinator Dave Steckel during the next defensive meeting.
“It’s called takeaway brownies,” Singleton said. “So whoever got takeaways, they get brownies in the next meeting. So we used to always have fun with that and that little culture. It was always fun to get those takeaways, and in the team meetings and everything like that you get recognized and they call your name and you get shirts and stuff. So it’s pretty cool. It was definitely something that we always strived to do.”
As Mauk knelt on the Faurot Field turf, ending the game, fans started to stream over the brick walls at the base of the bleachers and onto the field. Ray Charles’ “Georgia on My Mind” played over the loudspeakers. The Missouri players remained on the field, reveling in the win alongside each other, family members, students and fans they didn’t know.
“That was a great feeling,” Singleton said. “To see the fans rush the field — they always used to tell the fans not to and they still did it. So it was pretty fun.”
Missouri wouldn’t achieve the redemption it sought in the SEC championship game, instead getting out-classed by No. 1 Alabama in a 42-13 loss. But the Tigers’ unlikely defense of their SEC East crown provided one final highlight in the golden age of Missouri football under Pinkel: a fifth division title and 10-win season across eight years. Singleton believes that Missouri team embodied what made Pinkel’s program so successful.
“Man, it was magical,” Singleton said. “It was fun to be around those guys. We had some great guys, some great leaders on that team, and everybody wanted to win. Everybody did it for the team. That’s what we practiced and what we preached, buy in and do it for the team.”
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