I posted my ten thoughts specific to the game on Saturday afternoon. I'll expand on those and go a little more big picture here.
1) I've always viewed my role here to be to remind you it's never as good as you think and never as bad as you think. So that means I play the wet blanket today. Saturday was a hell of an effort. It was one of the best, if not the best, game I've seen Mizzou play under Eli Drinkwitz. Had the Tigers pulled off the upset, obviously it's a potential season-changer. But in the end, it was a loss that dropped them under .500 for the season. That doesn't mean you can't take any positives away from it. You absolutely can. But those positives only matter if they translate to future weeks. Do we something similar to the level of play next Saturday in Gainesville? Or do we see a team that comes out knowing it's not playing the No. 1 team in the country and sinks down closer to the level of its competition? Saturday can be a turning point for Missouri. But it's too soon to say it was.
2) What we saw Saturday was something close to Mizzou's ceiling. I'm not sure we saw the absolute ceiling because there were mistakes. That wasn't the best game Missouri is capable of playing, but it's the closest we've seen. The first four weeks, what we saw was a lot closer to Mizzou's floor. Over the course of the season, things tend to even out and teams find the level they should. But what we do is we tend to judge everything on our most recent impression. That's why everyone has spent three weeks burying Missouri and deciding how soon Eli Drinkwitz should be fired. Missouri had played poorly three weeks in a row. Now that Missouri played well, it's back to looking at the bright side of things. Saturday raised the ceiling for me. I am back to being able to listen to this being a team that can make a bowl game out of a season that seemed lost a week ago. But if we're keeping score, we've seen better than average Missouri twice this year and worse than average Missouri three times. If Mizzou plays the way it played Saturday, it can absolutely win any game remaining on its schedule. If it plays the way it played most of the three previous Saturdays, it can absolutely lose every game remaining on its schedule other than New Mexico State. So the best-case scenario for me is now 8-4 (there's going to be a minimum of one week where they just don't play well enough to win) and the worst-case scenario is still 3-9 (which would involve playing really badly against Vandy).
3) One thing that had no downside on Saturday is the atmosphere.
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