Voice of the Fantlebury: A history of bad losses
After seven games this year, Missouri is 5-2 — a record that would be disappointing, sure, but not absurd if you’d glimpsed into your crystal ball in mid-August.
It’s the context of that record that provides the real gut punch, as the two losses came to Wyoming and Vanderbilt.
We know those losses were bad. Real bad. Missouri was a 17.5-point favorite against Wyoming; the Tigers were favored by 21 points against the Commodores, a team that lost by (pulls glasses down, squints at page) TWENTY-FOUR points to UNLV a week prior.
It’s almost Halloween, so in true masochistic nightmare-fuel mode, I wanted to know how bad these losses were historically for Missouri.
The short answer: Historically bad!
The long answer:
Since 2004 (as far back as I could find betting odds), Missouri had been favored by at least 10 points in 73 games. Their previous worst loss against the spread came in 2008, when the Tigers were 16 point favorites against Kansas in the final regular-season game of the year and lost 40-34.
These two losses were worse than the previous worst over the last 16 seasons.
Can it get worse? Sure.
In the 68 games in which Missouri was favored by at least 10 points prior to this season, the Tigers went 59-9. If you look at Gary Pinkel years in which the program was truly settled (2006-2014), Missouri went 41-5. From 2010 through 2015, Missouri went 26-1 — with the one loss being (you guessed it!) to Indiana in 2014.
So while we tended to criticize Missouri for losing some games it shouldn’t have under Pinkel, from 2006-2015, that really didn’t happen that often at all (at least by the 10-point favorite mark). The bad losses stick out because they were just that, but even I was surprised to see how rare those were.
In Barry Odom’s first three years as Missouri’s coach, his teams went 11-0 when favored by at least ten points. There were plenty of losses, but you could count on Missouri winning games it absolutely should have.
Now, in Year Four — a year that could mark the beginning of that “truly settled” range — the Tigers now have two of their worst losses against the spread since Facebook was invented. In 2004, you couldn’t even blindly express your rage in the comments section of an article you didn’t read.
That’s where I have this paradox as a fan. Part of me is angry that two out-of-nowhere losses derailed what could have been a special year. Now, for this year to be an improvement over last, for this year to become special, Missouri would have to pull off a tall upset or two.
The other part of me, though, is realizing that while these two losses are bad, they’re still outliers in Odom’s tenure. Before this year, he’s won every game he absolutely was supposed to win going in.
Missouri doesn’t have to wait long to have a shot at making good when it’s a big favorite. The Tigers are 10.5-point favorites this weekend in Lexington. If Missouri is going to right the ship and prove that these two losses were simply the team at its worst, and not a symptom of something deeper, then a new winning streak needs to start Saturday.