Coaches like to preach the importance of winning all three phases of a football game. Missouri took care of that in the first 8:19 against SEMO on Saturday night.
Larry Rountree III opened the scoring with a three-yard touchdown run on the first offensive drive of the night for Mizzou. That score came with 12:05 remaining, capping a 75-yard drive on which Rountree actually had 85 yards of total offense.
Three plays later, Cale Garrett intercepted Daniel Santacaterina and returned it 27 yards for the second Tiger touchdown. That made it 13-0 after a missed extra point.
“I think we had it covered,” Garrett deadpanned about a play on which two or three Tiger defenders were in position to make the pick.
After a touchdown pass from Kelly Bryant to Albert Okwuegbunam, SEMO’s second drive of the night ended with a punt…which Richaud Floyd returned 71 yards for a touchdown.
“When I hit the sideline, I saw a sea of black in front of me, all my teammates,” Floyd said. “Then I saw the punter, I was like, ‘I made it this far, I can’t get tackled by the punter.’”
With 6:41 left in the first quarter it was 27-0 Mizzou. The Tigers had scored on offense (twice), defense and special teams.
“That’s the way that should have started,” head coach Barry Odom said.
Only five teams managed to score a touchdown by punt return, interception return, pass and run in a game last year. The Tigers did it in 2017 against Vanderbilt. And most importantly, the game was over.
“I hope we’re in that situation a lot,” Odom said. “But I don’t know that we kept our edge. It’s human nature that you get in position and you want to take a breath and relax. As soon as you do that, you lose your ability to finish what you started.”
The Tigers limped through much of the second quarter, but did put up ten points in the final few minutes to take a 37-0 lead into the locker room. The starters got half of the third quarter on each side of the ball and then Odom emptied his bench.
“There’s a little bit of conversation on the headset on both sides and I said, ‘Guys, if we get somebody hurt here, up 40 something, the opponent we were playing, I would have a hard time looking at my team,” Odom said. “Tried to get everybody that was eligible in the game. We got pretty close to doing that.”
There are two ways to look at it: Either Missouri got a breather and gave the starters 30 minutes off the week before a critical SEC East game against South Carolina or the Tigers tuned up for their biggest game of the season with a matchup that probably provided less than Mizzou could have gotten out of an intrasquad scrimmage.
“Coach Odom said it's zero zero, finish the game, finish the game, finish the game,” Rountree said. “We did so and I believe that if we come in with the same mentality throughout every game we'll be fine.
“It's already a new week and a new opportunity to get healthy,” Garrett said. “Be smart tonight and protect the team, tomorrow is South Carolina. Even tonight, thinking about it already, resting up, preparing for it physically already.”
Odom didn’t really want to answer when he was asked how he felt about playing games against FCS competition earlier this week.
“I've had one or two small votes in scheduling in like 2025. So don't hold me to the reasons this season the way it is lined up,” the coach said. “What's best, what's not, I need to refrain from from having too many comments on. I need to get my guys ready to go play no matter who the opponent is, and maybe some day I can stand up here and say, 'Hey, this is the way we ought to schedule. And this is what we ought to do.' But I'm not there yet.”
All you can do is beat the teams that are on the schedule. Missouri did it in dominant fashion. Who knows what it means for next week? Likely nothing, or at least no more than South Carolina’s 24-point loss to second-ranked Alabama early in the day.
“They’re going to be ready to play,” Odom said of the Gamecocks. “I know my team is going to be ready to play.”
