Ten Thoughts for Monday Morning
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1) Let's get this out of the way first: Saturday was a BRUTAL loss. You can't lose that game. Not if you want anybody to believe you're as good as people have thought you are. I don't care if it's year one, year four or year 12, you can't go lose a game to a team that got run off the very same field by UNLV last weekend and had appeared to pretty much give up on the season and resigned to the idea that they were going to be playing for a different coach next year. Before I make any other points to the contrary, it is important to say that there is no putting lipstick on the pig that Missouri put out there on Saturday. The Wyoming loss was putrid. But it was a season opener on the road in a weird place to play and it was somewhat fluky. Saturday wasn't fluky. Both teams had a crippling turnover, but Missouri scored off the Vandy turnover and Vandy didn't score off the Missouri turnover. Vanderbilt was just better. Start to finish. In virtually every phase of the game. If you knew nothing about the two teams prior to Saturday and you tuned in for three hours, you'd say the better team won the game. So, yeah, it was horrendous.
2) The entire offense (and the kicker) get to share blame for why Missouri lost. There was not one position group on offense that enjoyed watching film on Saturday because they pretty much all had their worst days of the season. But the one that was most glaring and most damaging to me was the quarterback.
Last week in this space I wrote about how Kelly Bryant's strongest point so far had been his ability to forget bad plays and bad quarters and bad halves and do enough to lead his team to victory. It's why I really expected Missouri to win the game all the way until their drive stalled out and they (for reasons unbeknownst to me still) attempted a 48 yard field goal and never got the ball back. I thought Bryant would do enough. He did not. I don't really have a good explanation for it. There were times he ran too soon, times he ran too late, times he overthrew open receivers, times he tried to force the ball to covered receivers. He looked indecisive. Most of the season, he's been better than I expected. He hasn't really had to go out and win a game for Missouri yet. They needed him to do it on Saturday (or at least they needed SOMEBODY to do it). He couldn't.
I've said for months that fan expectations of Bryant were too high. He's seven games into this season and already has tied his career high in touchdown passes, is on pace to shatter his career high in yards and has his highest QB rating of his career. But we're talking about a guy who has started for one year and a couple games. He was never on any all-ACC teams. He lost his job at Clemson. He's an above average to good college quarterback. He is not a great college quarterback and he is not an NFL quarterback. He's good enough to win quite a few games if he gets enough help. He got no help on Saturday. Thus, he lost.
Bryant isn't quite as good as we probably all thought during the five-game winning streak. He is not as bad as he looked on Saturday. He's a solid quarterback. The question is if that's good enough for Missouri to get close to where we thought they'd get.
3) There are two baffling things about this offense. I'm going to start with the most baffling and that's the usage of Albert Okwuegbunam.