If you looked in the mirror, would you like what you saw? Missouri hasn't for much of the season. It did on Saturday. But instead of a mirror, the Tigers just looked across the line of scrimmage to see themselves.
The Tigers traveled halfway across the country, but still found themselves in Columbia. Then they lined up across from a team that did its best (pre-Saturday) Missouri impression for 60 minutes. The Tigers will travel back to their own Columbia a .500 football team largely because South Carolina became Mizzou on the very day Mizzou finally quit being itself. Or at least the version of itself it had been most of the season.
All season, Missouri has been close. A suffocating defense has kept the Tigers in games. But an inept offense has failed to do enough to capitalize. The Tigers hang around. They make it interesting. But penalties, mistakes, turnovers, inaccurate passes or a sieve of an offensive line derails the effort. It’s not always the same thing, but it’s always something.
Finally, on Saturday, the shoe was on the opponent’s foot.
Missouri nearly doubled up the Gamecocks in yards, 367 to 203. By the end of the day, the penalties were close to even, with the Tigers actually drawing one more flag. But committing only six was an improvement for the Tigers and most of them seemed to come on a single defensive drive at the end of the first half. They weren’t nearly as crippling as those committed by South Carolina. One of those negated an interception. Hey, nobody said all the calls were correct ones.
The Tigers have been derailed by an offense that too often went backward on first down and could rarely get enough yardage on third down, largely because they often needed a whole lot of yardage in that situation. Against the Gamecocks, Missouri was 8/16 on third down, including conversions on five of their first six on the way to a 17-0 lead in the second quarter. South Carolina was just 5/13 in the same situation, quite often third-and-long created by a Missouri defense that was driving the Gamecocks backward on first and second down.
After the defense forced South Carolina’s sixth punt in nine drives, Missouri’s offense got the ball back with 10:23 to play. The ground six minutes and eight seconds off the clock, leaving South Carolina with little more than desperation.
Most obviously, of course, Missouri’s quarterback outplayed South Carolina’s. Spencer Rattler was a high-school all-American and a five-star and a (supposed) one-time Heisman candidate. He even, very briefly this offseason, seemed to be someone Eli Drinkwitz might want to be his quarterback. Instead, that’s Brady Cook, the much-maligned third-year sophomore who Mizzou fans keep looking to send to the bench at every opportunity.
The two actually came into the game with nearly identical stat lines this season. The only real difference was wins and losses, which is hardly all on the quarterback, but is usually put on him more than anyone but the coach. On this day it was Cook who ended up 17-for-26 for 224 yards. Rattler countered with 20-for-30 for 171. Each quarterback had a touchdown run, but Cook had 53 yards to Rattler’s minus-2. And the only two turnovers came from the Carolina signal caller.
Cook was the superior quarterback. Nobody that watched would disagree.
“He’s taken a lot of crap and criticism,” Drinkwitz said in the postgame interview on SEC Network. “That sucker showed up and got a top 25 win on the road and that dude deserves a lot of praise this week.”
This game was simple: Missouri—Cook included—avoided the mistakes it has made to torpedo itself all season long. South Carolina didn’t. Oh, how the turntables have turned. South Carolina was Missouri and Missouri was finally on the right side of things Saturday night. Truthfully, Missouri and South Carolina had had pretty similar seasons to this point. But the Gamecocks were 5-2 and ranked 25th in the country because they had taken advantage of mistakes by the opposition while Mizzou was 3-4 because the Tigers had managed to mess up once too often just about every week.
On Saturday, it was South Carolina that couldn’t get out of its own way and Missouri that played, while not perfect, relatively clean football. In the process, Missouri for the first time executed its game plan for success. The offense wasn’t great. It can’t win a track meet with Tennessee. It’s not going to put up 50. There are still red zone issues and a relative lack of explosive plays and suddenly the kicker might be a question mark. But if Mizzou can get out of its own way and eliminate the mistakes on offense, it’s good enough to make a bowl game. It might even be good enough to win seven.
The defense will lead the way there. The offense has been welcome to come along for the ride all season. On Saturday night, it finally grabbed a seat and came out a winner while the other team made the mistakes that left them losers.
This way seemed better. Missouri should do it more often.
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