The end spoiled Saturday, doesn't have to spoil Mizzou's season
The elements to the story were all there. The stadium was sold out. The sun splashed Faurot Field endlessly on the first Saturday that truly felt like fall this season. Chase Daniel banged the drum. Jeremy Maclin saw his number put on the Ring of Honor.
It was so easy to close your eyes and feel like it was 2013 again. Or 2007. Or 2008. Or 2010. Or any of the other years in the first part of this century in which Missouri football was this thing that you looked forward to all week and then were rewarded by with yet another victory on Saturday.
And for the better part of 55 minutes of game time on Saturday, it was all lining up.
Brady Cook hit Luther Burden for 42 yards and Mookie Cooper for 14 and Cody Schrader carried it three times for the final 11 yards and Missouri took a 39-35 lead on LSU with 5:40 to play and it just felt like this was the day all 62,621 fans in attendance and thousands tuned in across the state, the country and the world have been waiting on for nearly a decade now.
And then it wasn't.
In the final 5:40, Jayden Daniels led a five-play, 75-yard touchdown drive, Missouri turned 2nd and 1 into 4th and 32 and Major Burns intercepted Cook and returned it 17 yards for a touchdown that turned what seemed most of the day like a Missouri win into a 49-39 loss that was closer than the final score will indicate.
In the moment, it's gutting for Mizzou and its fans.
“Positives?" defensive end Darius Robinson said, repeating a quest to buy himself time to formulate a response. "I don’t know. When you lose you try not to see any positives. I don’t have any positives right now. Losing hurts. We work really hard each week, we’re only given one opportunity a week for 12 weeks.”
That's the right answer. This is big boy football. Moral victories don't exist. It doesn't much matter that six weeks ago most people thought LSU was headed to the College Football Playoff and Mizzou was headed for a coaching search and the actuality is that these two teams are a lot closer to equal than anyone thought they were in August.
The truth is that Missouri and its fans will spend the next six days lamenting all the ways in which the Tigers lost a game they should have won. Those reasons start with stupid penalties (you can decide whether you think it's worse to have your center torpedo a game-winning drive by not knowing when to snap the ball--again--or to have your best pass rusher kicked out of the game for spitting at an opposing player). They continue with crippling turnovers and a defense that has gone from the unit that carried the team to one that's being dragged along.
All of those things are valid. Missouri could have won this game pretty easily. Maybe should have won this game. And in the moment, it's absolutely fair to be incredibly frustrated by the fact that it didn't happen.
But it's also worth noting that the loss was Mizzou's first. It eliminated the possibility of an undefeated season...and absolutely nothing else.
"Everything we want is still right in front of us," running back Cody Schrader said after a 114-yard, three-touchdown performance.
"We can still do a lot of good things," Robinson said. "This game could have easily went either way. We still got a lot of good things ahead of us."
Eli Drinkwitz noted that Missouri still has virtually the entire SEC East schedule in front of it. It starts next week at Kentucky. Tennessee looks worse than it was last year. So does Georgia. Mizzou will probably be favored against South Carolina and Florida. Saturday was a missed opportunity, but it was hardly a day that needs to sink a season.
A month ago, we didn't know if Missouri had a quarterback. Now we lament that he ended a streak of 368 passes without an interception at a really inopportune time. We didn't know if the Tigers had an offense that was capable of winning games in which it had to score more than 20 points. We hoped that Mizzou had one of college football's best wide receivers, but we didn't know it. Now we do. We had chalked an October matchup with LSU down as an absolute loss, not to mention affairs with the Vols and Bulldogs.
But Missouri showed Saturday that it has intentions to hang around and be part of the conversation in October and November. There are things it has to fix for that to happen, no question. The pessimist will spend the next six days angry that the Tigers just kicked away a chance to win their first ranked versus ranked game since the 2013 Cottom Bowl. The optimist will realize that they made a million mistakes and still had every opportunity to beat a team that many thought was one of college football's best just a few weeks ago.
Prior to the game, I was on the sidelines talking to someone who moved to Columbia two years ago. This is the third Mizzou football season he's seen. He marveled at the jam-packed stands and the star-studded list of recruits mingling on the sidelines. He hadn't seen it before.
I have. I've seen this stadium at its best. I've seen this program at its best. You can look at Saturday's game as a reminder that it isn't quite back there yet. And I won't tell you that's wrong.
But there's another way to look at it, too. Saturday showed you it's possible again.
"It was beautiful, man," offensive tackle Javon Foster said of the atmosphere while Mizzou was racing to a 22-7 lead over LSU.
To badly butcher James Earl Jones' legendary Field of Dreams soliloquy, Saturday was a reminder of what we love about this game and this place. It was a reminder of all that was once good and all that can be good again. It's not there yet. Whether it gets there this year will be determined over the next six weeks. But you can see it from here.
Saturday was set up to be a fairy tale. The ending didn't support the rest of the story. But there are more chapters to be written.
PowerMizzou.com is a proud game day partner of Yuengling Traditional Lager the taste of game-time @yuenglingbeer #LagerUp
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